WEBVTT

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OK.

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Sorry.

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[COUGHS] It's dry here.

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[LAUGHTER]

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Even when it's raining.

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I know.

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OK.

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Whoo!

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The next poem that I'm going
to read is called "The Birth

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and Death Corn."

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And what I want to tell you
about is when I was born,

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I was very sick
and I almost died.

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And when I was six days
old, I had a surgery

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to basically open me up
from sternum to pelvis,

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and they removed a gangrenous
part of my intestine.

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And I found out
that in the 1960s,

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it was the common practice.

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You didn't give
anesthetic to infants.

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They didn't think that the nerve
endings were developed enough

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that it would matter.

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So at the most, I had
a muscle relaxant.

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And when I lived in
Santa Fe, New Mexico,

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where I lived for 19 years,
I had an amazing bodyworker

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named Jensen, who
was really a shaman.

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And I have
musculoskeletal issues

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that are a result of
the surgery that I had,

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and I started to see
Jensen for help with that.

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The other thing that you
need to know about this poem

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is that this book now, do
you know where you are,

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was driven by great
anxiety about the future.

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Most of the poems take
place between 2016 and 2020,

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which to me--

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exactly.

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Which to me, that's really when
we entered the 21st century.

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I feel like for me, that's
the period where, oh,

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this is what the 21st century is
going to be about is everything

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we're contending with.

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And I really became aware of
it during that time period,

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the other thing that's happening
before this poem, the occasion

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of this poem, is that I was
getting ready to leave Santa

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Fe after 19 years and moved
to Saint Louis, Missouri,

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where I now live.

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A city I knew very little about.

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I was freaked out.

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So I went to see Jensen
and was telling him

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how afraid I was
about everything

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personal and collective.

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Well, he was like
doing chiropractic.

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And while I was on the table,
he started to tell me a story,

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and I started to
realize that him telling

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the story while also
manipulating my body

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was the same treatment.

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And he meant it that way.

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He was an intuitive.

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So this is the story
that he told me.

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And it does relay the
death of an infant,

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but it relays other things.

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"The Birth and Death Corn."

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"Yesterday, I went
to see Jensen,

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and while I was on the table, he
told me the story of the birth

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and death corn.

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While he held the back
of my head, probing my

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fucked up neck with his fingers.

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While I was coming off S's
grief because J left her,

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D's grief because R left
him, because D's father died

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and grief spun out reactive
until he stood in tears

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at the bottom of my stairs.

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I had a laundry basket in
one arm and D in the other.

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He was about to vanish into a
cell in Christ in the desert.

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My Jewish Buddhist friend.

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And I was feeling
so scared of walking

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into the future when the present
felt so dark and changed.

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A couple he had worked
with, the mother

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in labor and the
baby's heart stopping,

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the father so freaked out, he
called Jensen from the room

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where they were jumping the
baby, trying to get it to start,

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race, race, jump and
its battery going.

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But the doctors aren't
happy, the father

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said to Jensen on the phone.

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Because the brain was long gone.

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By law, they'd have to keep
it hooked up for four days

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until damage could be
itemized, asserted as fact.

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But everyone knew the
soul baby was gone

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and they were tending
a meat balloon.

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The four days passed and
they let the body go.

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And then as he prodded my
neck and moved my skull around

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like a cap shoved wrong
on top of a bottle,

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they sewed her umbilical
into the ground,

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mixed with seed corn and
the mother's placenta.

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And nine months later, when
the new corn was ready,

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they mashed it with
water, making a pulp.

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Jensen was there.

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He told me about it.

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While I lay there
so scared of walking

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into the future, how
the family gave everyone

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who had gathered a cup.

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And he said, everyone drank her.

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They drank her.

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And to me, it was the opposite
of grief's black milk.

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They told stories about
the soul baby's lineage.

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How her spirit wrote the
stories like a current,

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how the drinking and the
telling were the same.

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To be remembered, he
said, and to nourish.

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And then he moved one hand
from my neck to my sacrum,

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and with the other pushed a
finger deep into my belly,

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into the crossroad hole
in my network of scars.

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Once I had been a baby
who had been born dying.

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And really, isn't that
how each of us is born?

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Grow now and die in the future.

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He told me about the
birth and death corn."

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