WEBVTT

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Thank you for coming.

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What I want to know is why does
the Persona Magazine people get

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cookies and I don't?

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When I Was Conceived.

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It was 1945 and it was May.

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White crocus
bloomed in St Louis.

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The Germans gave in
but the war shoved on.

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And my father came
home from work

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that evening tired
and washed his hands,

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not picturing the black goggled
men with code names fashioning

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an atomic bomb.

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Maybe he loved his
wife that evening,

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maybe after eating she smoothed
his jawline in her palm

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as he stretched out on the
couch with his head in her lap

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while Bob Hope spoofed
Hirohito on the radio

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and they both laughed.

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My father sold used cars at
the time and didn't like it.

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So if he complained,
maybe she held him

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an extra moment in her arms.

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The heat in the air
pressing between them,

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so they turned upstairs early
that evening arm and arm

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without saying anything.

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I wrote that poem
when I was teaching

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a course in the 20th
century, humanities,

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and reading a lot of
histories and discovered

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that I was conceived
between the time

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that the Germans
surrendered and the bomb

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was dropped on Hiroshima,
which somehow struck me

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as an apt metaphor.

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I also read at the University of
Virginia last year and someone

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who taught there xeroxed that
poem and gave it to his class

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and had them all write
when I was conceived poems

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as an exercise.

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They were very similar to this
one, but all of their poems

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had their parents watching
television instead of

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listening to the radio.

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