WEBVTT

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"Donika Questions the Oracle."

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[LAUGHTER]

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Yeah, I really like my name.

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I like it so much.

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I've been reading all
of these male poets,

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and they kept putting
their names and things.

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And I was like, I'm going
to put my name in something.

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So there's just the delight of
reading the title of this one.

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"Donika Questions the Oracle."

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"Who hid my dad in the
mountain impoverished

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where he would remain
invisible and rationed, not

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on milk and honey, but
on baloney and saltines

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until he grew strong
enough to kill the father?

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Which father?

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Do I mean his daddy, exiled for
the rest of his diabetic days

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to a closet in a house
with no power, no water,

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where my dad, his sisters, and
his brothers caught for a time

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by the crack rock and the pipe
lighting up in the dark lived?

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Surely not as Daddy Oracle.

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Surely not.

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How long was he the youngest?

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How long was he a child?

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What God swallowed him whole?

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The God perhaps who
split his mother in two

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or took his brother with a
bullet from another father's

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gun in the sunlight
in the afternoon.

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Did he really hold his dying
brother's hand, Oracle,

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the brother who wanted only
an apology on my dad's behalf?

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Who held him when
his mother died?

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Who told him of a heaven where
dead mothers and brothers go?

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Oh, the pigeons.

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What of the pigeons,
Oracle, did he

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tend them, watch them
rise from the roof

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of the house with
no power or water,

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but a daddy in a closet,
his sisters, and brothers

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flaring in the rock light?

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Did he delight in their return?

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The pigeons, I mean.

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Did he ever delight, Oracle,
in anything a child might?

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Did he look for his
name in the sky?

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Did he ride a bike made from
junk parts in the South Central

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LA sun fast as a boy might?

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Surely, he did that, Oracle.

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Surely that.

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And when he rose
like an improbable

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stone from the father's gut,
whichever father I mean here,

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whichever father makes sense,
the siblings, the pigeons,

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his daddy in exile,
his name in the sky,

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when he rose with
the stone of himself

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in his hand covered in bile
and mucus, free now of someone

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more powerful than the
child he surely once

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was, did he know the terrible
thing he would become?"

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