Tyler mentioned that tomorrow there's
a performance at Tucson MOCA.
And it's from five poems that occur across the book that
are all connected.
And I'm going to start the first one right now.
It begins with an epigraph from the writer
Cristina Rivera Garza, which is, "In the beginning,
there was the we, we being the most intimate
and also the most political form of accessing
one's subjectivity."
I have no idea what time it is.
--timing myself, 7:24.
"Consequences Upon Arrival."
"The sharp calls advancing across the valley
were no longer for us.
Or they would be again, but not yet.
Stretching yards and deserts in their weight.
Though we could name the places and their capitals.
We could pull a needle through every orifice long and small.
Water falling is the sensual conflict of a heart split open.
We felt for every boundary, adjacent to which neighboring
vertebrates fed themselves.
A simple degree toward the wrong coordinate and the moment
could change completely.
And the change would be thoroughly complete.
Would ring through the bones of our appearance.
A thoroughly surrounding contraindicative pulse.
The voices advancing, in some instances observing our fear,
accelerated the physical expression of hours.
Publicly.
In suggestive incongruent thrusts.
We slept through the engine-braking.
The conflicting nightmilk intrusions.
Woke morning after morning to swarms of fruit sucking bees.
They too on their way downriver to welcome
the morning in a good way.
Tender ensembles to articulate the water's edge.
We woke to the doorframe at the edge of dunes, which we'd always
believed was a metaphor.
But there ajar along the sagged sand fencing.
We said this with care, though the sagging
was one of hostility.
We said, someone should fix that.
Little passed through the frame,
The pussing stitches,
The counter stitches,
The stitched rosettes,
Tenderness surrounding their appearance,
Tenderness integrating an introduction,
A growing necessity to breed.
We followed our intentions.
Swaying.
Soft with desire on the tails of the processions whose shoulders
did not rise above the brush.
Our intentions pleaded in such a way
that our intentions could neither be challenged
nor brought entirely to light.
Their tenderness veiled by the inversion of light.
Doubt, our precise and technical transformation.
Of all the things we didn't know:
The most efficient way to release a dog's bite is to--
we never would have guessed--
put a finger in its ass.
Which demonstrates clearly the importance
of context with regard to appropriate behavior.
Context was what we waited for.
These conflicts in passing accumulated in the moment
for which we prepared.
Though when it arrived we were wet.
We were wide-eyed and well-read.
Waiting.
Readiness, we realized, was never the appropriate goal."
I want to give a shout out to Amber Morning Star Byars
here in the front row who taught me
that the most efficient way to release
a dog's bite is to put a finger in its ass, never
would have known.