[APPLAUSE]
Oh, my God.
Thank you.
No, thank you.
I just wanted to keep talking.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
What an honor for that to be here with you
all for the invitation, Diana, to be reading
with Carl, an old friend.
This is such a beautiful space.
Tucson is such a beautiful city.
I'm so honored to be here.
I'm a little choked up.
That was a lot.
Thank you.
So I'm going to read from my latest collection.
This is part of the poet, the Texas Poet Laureate Series,
and it's a collection of new and selected.
And so I'm going to read a little bit from here,
but I visited Claire McLane's class earlier today.
And I think she asked if I would be reading anything
from my new manuscript.
And so I brought it with me, and I'm actually working on it.
I was editing in the plane, so I didn't
want to take it out of order.
So I just brought it with me.
So I'll read a couple of poems from there, too.
But I'm going to start off with a new poem,
and it's called "On Eating Rattlesnake."
"I remember it only once.
I was small.
Maybe it was the one my father shot off the front porch.
Maybe it wasn't.
The men stood around the fire.
The women sat inside.
I sneaked around the men hiding myself, slither.
I have seen it many times.
The long stripping, one fist pulling skin, another pulling
flesh, and how the kills were celebrated.
Rattles and skins hung like tapestries.
The innards left to wild things.
When it was passed around hot from the fire,
the women did not partake.
I dug in rough and curious.
There was nothing more unashamed than a rattler.
No apology in its tongue.
It would never be cute.
I had to eat it.
I had to know this."