Hello.
Good evening.
Thank you everyone for being here.
Thank you, Noah for that and for Hannah--
thank you, Hannah, for that beautiful introduction
and to everyone who organized this event
and brought it to be, which includes all of you,
includes everyone at the Poetry Center,
custodial staff, everyone.
Yeah.
I'm thankful to do my part to make this event happen.
I'm going to read two poems from "Safe Space," which is--
I feel really the book I should be reading all the poems from.
But I'm like a child and this is a toy that I had 5 years ago.
And it's-- I love it.
It's in my room.
It's one of my favorites.
I'd be very upset if my dad threw it away.
But these are my new toys and I want to show you these ones.
So I encourage you to enjoy this one too.
But-- "Home State."
U may not know this about me, but I grew up
a gay baby in the United States of America.
The United States was a then briefly lived
conceptual project performed by pop artist John Baldessari.
Children were a primary form of currency and u
would often see them on beaches or in strip malls advertising
diet books and drinking espresso.
On a typical day in the United States,
people would send each other text messages
like what chemicals are in ur body today.
In the United States, u could always say sexualize my crisis
in the right poem.
It's hard to believe, but to this day,
they still high-five each other in the United States.
Once when exchanging my brother's
favorite pathology for a pair of Cirque Du Soleil tickets,
I saw a t-shirt that said a hole is a hole
is a hole in Fort Myers, Florida.