I'm going to read From the Catalogue of Cruelty.
And I feel sometimes conflicted about reading this one in part,
because I feel bad remembering slapping my sister.
It's how the poem starts.
The speaker slaps her sister, but I also
slap my sister, so there's a way that we
are very close in this moment.
I don't know, and kids are hard.
And also later, the speaker, like myself,
I kicked my friend in the testicles,
I felt bad about that.
See you all are laughing, but you wouldn't if you
were the one who would've been kicked in the testicles.
So I just want you to know I feel bad.
That feels important to me.
I'm not like, ha ha.
So From the Catalogue of Cruelty.
Once, I slapped my sister with the back of my hand.
We were so small, but I wanted to know how it felt.
My hand raised high across the opposite shoulder,
slicing down like a trapeze.
Her face caught my hand.
I'd slapped her in our yellow room
with circus animals on the curtain.
I don't remember how it felt. I was a rough child.
I said no.
I said, these are my things.
I was speaking, usually, of my socks.
White, athletic, thin and already gray on the bottom,
never where I left them.
I was speaking of my fists raining down
on my brother's back.
My sister's socks.
In the fourth grade, in California,
I kicked Charles in the testicles.
At that school, we played softball.
Hit the red playground ball with the size of our hands
and ran the bases.
I kicked Charles with the top of my foot,
caught him in the hinge of ankle.
I wanted to see what would happen.
I didn't believe anything could hurt like it did on TV.
Charles folded in half at the crease of his waist.
My God, I was a rough child, but I believed Charles,
that my foot turned him to paper.
Later, I kicked my dad the same way, but he did not crumple.
It was summer in Arkansas.
What humidity, these children, full of water.
I hit him also with a frying pan.
I hit him also with a guitar.
We laughed later.
Where had the guitar come from?
My dad was a star collapsing.
The first thing a dying star does
is swell, swallows whatever is near.
He tried to take us into his body, which was
the house the police entered.
This is how I knew he was dying.
I'd called the police.
What is your name?
He tried to put us through the walls of the house the police
entered, which was his body.
What is your name?
Compromised.
The integrity of a body contracting.
What is your name, sir?
He answered, Cronos.
He answered, I'm hungry.
He answered, a God long dead.
He threw up all his children right there on the carpet.
After all, we were so small, the children.
The thing about a star collapsing
is that it knows neither that it is a star nor in collapse.
Everything is stardust, everything essential.
What is your name?
Everything is resisting arrest.
Its gravity crushes the children and the cruiser's
rear passenger window.
The officer didn't know the star's name.
White dwarf?
Black hole?
To see, throw the collapsing star face first into anything.
Face first into the back seat.
Face first into the pepper spray.
Face first onto the precinct lawn.
Did you know you could throw a star?
Do you understand gravity, its weaknesses?
You are in my house.
You should already know my name.