Good evening, everybody.
Thank you so much for coming out the day after a holiday
to hear poetry.
Yay.
Poetry is alive.
And thank you so much to the entire team at the Poetry
Center who is so generous with their time and their attention
to writers.
I'm so happy to be here.
I'm still new to Arizona.
I haven't quite been here a full year,
so this is my first summer.
And I am doing good.
And I have just found that Arizona has been so welcoming,
and has been a really--
such a place that I have found home already.
So thank you all so much, and for coming out
to hear me and July read tonight.
I'm going to be reading from two of my manuscripts
and then a couple of new pieces at the end to sort of show you
some variety, and a little bit of the breadth of the work
that I do.
It's always nice to hear some new pieces as well, right.
So I'm going to start from A Form and Gather.
And the piece that I'm going to read first,
and you're never supposed to say this as a poet,
but I actually have a favorite poem that I wrote.
And this is one of my favorite poems
because it talks a little bit about me, and who I am,
and who I am with my partner.
We are fanatic documentary watchers.
We know that there are places that I'm never going to go,
like the moon.
I'm probably never going to go to the moon.
I probably never going to go to the highest peaks in Patagonia.
I want to, but I'm probably not.
As well as the deep sea.
The deep, deep ocean is quite an obsession with me
in metaphoric as well as thought-provoking ways.
And so in watching this one documentary,
my mind kept reeling, and reeling, and reeling.
Thinking about what makes us up, what makes us something.
What makes us special.
So this poem is called, "Decoy."
I am the ocean bottom.
My crater is full of bioluminescence.
Twinkling and heavy, heavy dark.
Who speaks to the float circling inside them.
Cut open a creature.
What do you expect?
A line of labels and a thing exposed.
Think clever me.
Let's slice an eel, pare down parts.
See how we mean.
Now you, eel under knife, now me,
hold the blade away from anything that tears.
Coal, the power of light, of adaptation.
The fish in heavy wet with a glowing lure on its head.
That's something.
Do you need to collect all parts to be something?
When first you swim, flesh remembers amniotic everything.
You, on the other hand, ignore the innate sense of fluidity.
When I say you, I mean, I. A little I thou never hurt,
as long as you fasten others' oxygen mask first.
I am a giant tube worm.
Plume scarlet.
Think hemoglobin.
Think what carries in the presence of sulfide.
Think insides I wear out.
And you consider float the decoy made of bob and shine and teeth
and fins and, and, and.