OK.
Sorry.
[COUGHS] It's dry here.
[LAUGHTER]
Even when it's raining.
I know.
OK.
Whoo!
The next poem that I'm going to read is called "The Birth
and Death Corn."
And what I want to tell you about is when I was born,
I was very sick and I almost died.
And when I was six days old, I had a surgery
to basically open me up from sternum to pelvis,
and they removed a gangrenous part of my intestine.
And I found out that in the 1960s,
it was the common practice.
You didn't give anesthetic to infants.
They didn't think that the nerve endings were developed enough
that it would matter.
So at the most, I had a muscle relaxant.
And when I lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
where I lived for 19 years, I had an amazing bodyworker
named Jensen, who was really a shaman.
And I have musculoskeletal issues
that are a result of the surgery that I had,
and I started to see Jensen for help with that.
The other thing that you need to know about this poem
is that this book now, do you know where you are,
was driven by great anxiety about the future.
Most of the poems take place between 2016 and 2020,
which to me--
exactly.
Which to me, that's really when we entered the 21st century.
I feel like for me, that's the period where, oh,
this is what the 21st century is going to be about is everything
we're contending with.
And I really became aware of it during that time period,
the other thing that's happening before this poem, the occasion
of this poem, is that I was getting ready to leave Santa
Fe after 19 years and moved to Saint Louis, Missouri,
where I now live.
A city I knew very little about.
I was freaked out.
So I went to see Jensen and was telling him
how afraid I was about everything
personal and collective.
Well, he was like doing chiropractic.
And while I was on the table, he started to tell me a story,
and I started to realize that him telling
the story while also manipulating my body
was the same treatment.
And he meant it that way.
He was an intuitive.
So this is the story that he told me.
And it does relay the death of an infant,
but it relays other things.
"The Birth and Death Corn."
"Yesterday, I went to see Jensen,
and while I was on the table, he told me the story of the birth
and death corn.
While he held the back of my head, probing my
fucked up neck with his fingers.
While I was coming off S's grief because J left her,
D's grief because R left him, because D's father died
and grief spun out reactive until he stood in tears
at the bottom of my stairs.
I had a laundry basket in one arm and D in the other.
He was about to vanish into a cell in Christ in the desert.
My Jewish Buddhist friend.
And I was feeling so scared of walking
into the future when the present felt so dark and changed.
A couple he had worked with, the mother
in labor and the baby's heart stopping,
the father so freaked out, he called Jensen from the room
where they were jumping the baby, trying to get it to start,
race, race, jump and its battery going.
But the doctors aren't happy, the father
said to Jensen on the phone.
Because the brain was long gone.
By law, they'd have to keep it hooked up for four days
until damage could be itemized, asserted as fact.
But everyone knew the soul baby was gone
and they were tending a meat balloon.
The four days passed and they let the body go.
And then as he prodded my neck and moved my skull around
like a cap shoved wrong on top of a bottle,
they sewed her umbilical into the ground,
mixed with seed corn and the mother's placenta.
And nine months later, when the new corn was ready,
they mashed it with water, making a pulp.
Jensen was there.
He told me about it.
While I lay there so scared of walking
into the future, how the family gave everyone
who had gathered a cup.
And he said, everyone drank her.
They drank her.
And to me, it was the opposite of grief's black milk.
They told stories about the soul baby's lineage.
How her spirit wrote the stories like a current,
how the drinking and the telling were the same.
To be remembered, he said, and to nourish.
And then he moved one hand from my neck to my sacrum,
and with the other pushed a finger deep into my belly,
into the crossroad hole in my network of scars.
Once I had been a baby who had been born dying.
And really, isn't that how each of us is born?
Grow now and die in the future.
He told me about the birth and death corn."