[APPLAUSE]
Buenas tardes, Tucson.
Tijuana, back in the house.
Man, I haven't seen you folks for a long time.
This is my first reading in two years.
Yeah, I'm going to choke.
No, I'll be all right.
But Cindy, my beloved--
you all know Cindy.
She said, since this is your first reading in a long time,
you've got to get a picture.
So we're going to take a picture, right?
It's going to go in the memory book.
Let's see.
I do this sometimes at the festival, but--
all right, everybody smile.
Let's see.
[LAUGHTER]
That way.
This always embarrasses my kids.
[LAUGHTER]
There we go.
[APPLAUSE]
[LAUGHS] Thank you for coming.
A lot has changed, of course.
I'm a grandpa now.
So, yeah, it's good stuff.
I like it.
My beard wasn't as white when we went into lockdown, but--
So I have, they told me, 25 to 40 minutes to talk.
And I want to do some poems with you.
But if you've come to the book festival,
you know that I enjoy also performing
some prose from memory.
And I told Cindy, because poetry is a little serious,
I thought I would do my most uproarious and popular chapter
from House of Broken Angels.
And she said, you've done it already.
They've heard it.
I said, We need to laugh.
Some people haven't heard it.
So I may be retiring it now.
Because when your honey tells you, don't do it,
you've got to do what she says.
Also I just want to say there are
folks from Justice For All outside, collecting
names for justice for migrants, and deportees, and so forth.
So they asked me to say a word.
I said it.
I got a cool t-shirt.
It's good.
So I have a new book I'm putting together of poems.
It's been a little while since I did one.
It's going to be called Piedra.
And Piedra is a book that I was doing years ago, started
when I was here.
I was here working on The Hummingbird's Daughter,
living down at the Elysian Grove Market, down by El Minuto--
haunted.
And then I moved up here to North Vine,
right by the campus for a while.
Cindy was a reporter at the Tucson Citizen--
journalism scandal.
Thank you.
And we're very happy.
So--