Bienvenidos.
Welcome.
I'll be honest.
I'll be swaying a little too much
because I had a glass of wine I shouldn't have had.
But I think I'll be OK.
But I'm not nervous it's just the wine.
All right.
I'm going to begin with a couple of new--
it probably gets me to go--
some new work from my new book.
It's called "Other Fugitives and Other Strangers."
And in this one experiment a little
bit with other types, other forms of violence
and the different ways that it manifests itself
in relationships.
So this one's called "Freak."
"She was born a he.
A mass of heavy dark muscle that forced his father to drink.
No sober evening met the peephole
of an eye that held its breath when nurse or visitor looked
in.
The baby's limbs were pasted to the torso.
The fingers tightly stitched, unlike the penis,
which curved and curved into a soft solitary wrinkle.
To watch his son suckle was to witness his wife's breast turn
itself inside out.
From this creature, feared the father, a monster, chain
and leash, circus freakdom.
A parade of pink dwarves.
Bearded women and a four legged body with two somber skulls.
Worse yet, a salivating canine of a boy,
squatting in triumph over the rubbery flesh of its mother.
But for all ill fated scenarios the father could conceive,
nothing prepared him for the sultry woman his son became.
The boy bloomed inside seductive lavenders, greens plump
as pears gave him hips.
Sunflower yellows and magentas warmly breathing
taught him how to wiggle and whisper.
At night the mysteries of red revealed themselves to him,
to her.
The father trembled at the passion stirred within him.
All those years of resisting touch and kiss
had swollen up into temptation at the sight of her, his son,
reversed into the beauty of pleated skirts, lace ribbons,
nylons, opaque as and smoky bars.
Unable to escape desire the father grasped a shattered
bottle then plunged himself into this creature's bed
tearing cloth from skin, hair from scalp, flesh from bone--
the lady's lovely bones."