Good evening, Tuscon.
It's my first time here, actually.
It's a beautiful, beautiful city.
You have wild vegetation, which is amazing.
I grew up in LA, but the density of LA
doesn't really show much of the vegetation there.
So I'm really impressed by your cacti.
Thank you to the Poetry Center and for the Center
for Creative Photography for bringing me here.
And it's really such an honor to read
with both Javier, whom I respect dearly as a friend
but also as an NYU cohort.
We both graduated from the program, but also
Kim Addonizio.
I remember reading Tell Me, which
was one of the formative books for me.
And she put herself on the cover,
which I thought was so kickass.
I thought she was the Joan Jett of the poetry world--
[LAUGHTER]
So I loved that.
It was like, yeah, tell me.
Tell me, Kim.
So I'm going to start off with, again,
the poem that brought me here, actually.
Again, if you haven't seen the exhibition, go and see it.
And I'm sure people are going to have questions
later on in conjunction to that, so I'm pretty sure we all
have stories about it.
"Imago."
As soon as we became men, my brother and I wore skirts.
We pinched our skirt fronts into tents
for newly circumcised penises, the incisions
prone to stick painfully to our clothing.
I was partial to my sister's plaid skirt, a school
uniform she outgrew.
My brother favored one belonging to my grandmother, flowers
showering down his ankles.
By this stage, the skin around the tips of our penises
was swollen the size of dwarf tomatoes.
As a cure, my mother boiled young offshoots
of guava leaves.
Behind the streamline of hung fabric,
I sat on a stool and spread before a tin wash basin.
My mother bathed my penis with the warm broth,
the water trickling into the basin like soft rain
on our roof.
She cradled my organ, dried it with cotton,
wiping off the scabs melted by the warmth,
and she wrapped it in gauze, a cocoon
around my caterpillar sex.
I then thought of the others at the verge of their manhood,
my brother to replace me on the stool, a neighborhood of 11,
12, and 13-year-old boys wearing the skirts of their sisters
and grandmothers, touched by the hands of their mothers,
and baptized by green waters, and how, by week's end,
we will shed our billowy skirts like monarchs
and enter the gardens of our lives.