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I learned to touch myself after
we toppled from IHS visiting

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Jimmy.

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I, this dirty old engine
slumped and sentence

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stumbled into an episode
of family business,

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and to the parable of showtime.

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I drew the curtains.

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I lowered the volume.

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I lowered the synths
for grandmother,

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lowered the rounded
sounds of my foul spit.

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A foul spit which groaned
as the man and woman on TV

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went in and out of character.

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I learned to touch myself
when my father said

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the Navajo metaphor
for horny was gendered.

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But for this dirty little engine
in me, the feet of an IV stand

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webbed into a trip thong, it
snagged my notes of poetry

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on the oncology floor.

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There I learned sex might
not be gendered and learned

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to touch myself watching
the man and woman go

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in and out of character,
alternating between them,

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in and out, in and out as I did.

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Dripped, rocked, and salve
spit between Navajo and English

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at the ICU.

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And when the fat sweat
fell from the man's nose

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and onto the woman's
breasts, pickled into ash,

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my Holy Grail the same
way I watched the IV drip

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above Jimmy's bed fizzle out,
get replaced and drip again.

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I came at fizzled minerals
on her breasts rounded

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and sounds rounded in a
metronome of footsteps

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from the hall.

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I shuffled for the
remote, flicked the screen

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to private Benjamin Yazzie,
calling in the code.

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And learned pain was
a finger inside me.

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Pain stretched, bound and
boded, and excitement again.

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Sweat trickled down
Adam Beach's nose

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and no word came
in Navajo for sex.

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So I couldn't sound
the act of it.

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I spit, flocked, and red
spotted from my devout belly,

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gifted a re-translation
back into English

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as I've grown aware of
my middle spit, which

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sounded like my body,
whose a metronome is

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ticking back and forth.

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And if grandma's pain
is her foul spit,

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she too would hear a
metronome of feet, feet, feet,

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the same feet in the ICU beneath
my family, arguing an EKG,

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begging to amputate
Jimmy's leg where

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the cancer fixed and festered,
where the doctors moaned.

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There was not much else to pave
for this dirty old engines,

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great grandfather.

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This pain pressed and
transferred foul spit.

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I grew too aware, too
safe to allow a bird

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to enter this engine's throat.

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I reach for a shadow of a man
I discovered I never knew.

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Hoping his shape
might fill my hands.

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I tousled into excitement again.

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Out of distraction,
out of a testament

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of a new American pastime.

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I learned that I had not
grown anywhere near aware.

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So this dirty little engine
returned to family business,

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returned to Showtime,
turned a Sabbath of sweat

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and I continued to learn
how to touch myself.

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Thank you.

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[APPLAUSE]

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