 So this is our final Sunday afternoon of readings in our poetry and prose with a bit of backstory by Vermont authors, Words Out Loud. After the reading, as you may also know, we will have a reception down at the Kent Museum in the Backstory exhibit, where you can meet the authors. Today's authors are Rick Agrin and Elena Giorgio. And you can take in the art, have refreshments. And I encourage you to speak to the authors and tell them what moved you or struck you or what you enjoyed about their work today. That's sort of what it's all about. And if you're struck by art, let the curators know how you felt about the art in the museum. Next weekend, we won't have a reading. But in this same space at 2 o'clock, there will be a callous fall foliage concert, which is really a beautiful experience, all kinds of talent in the woods here. And that goes for about an hour. And at 3 o'clock after it, that's when the final closing celebration happens down at the Kent, which is a really festive occasion. So our first reader today is Rick Agrin. And since this is our closing pair of readings and we're in connection with backstory, I felt compelled to give a little backstory to introduce our writer today, Rick Agrin. Our story begins with chapter one about a year and a half ago, when I had just been part of a group reading at Down Home Restaurant in Montpelier, a man I'd not met came up to me to tell me what he enjoyed and what he related to about my poems. This is the chapter in which we learn the main character, Rick Agrin, loves poetry and loves to relate to poetry. Chapter two, sometime later, I find myself at Vermont Studio Center in Johnson for Vermont Studio Week, and the same character, Rick, is there as well. He gives a reading. He shares meals with other artists and writers in the dining hall. He has poems and conversation that make us laugh and writing and back stories that bring a tear to the eye. In this chapter, we find out that there are many sides to Rick. He likes to say he contains multitudes. Chapter three turns out Rick hosts his own poetry radio hour on WGDR, Von Mott Radio. When he hears about the Words Out Loud series last year, he's excited to get someone on the air to talk about the presenters. When it turns out that someone is going to be me, he suggests I talk about the poets and read my own work, too. This is the chapter where we learn Rick likes to give all poets airtime. I realize I don't have enough time or room to keep adding chapters here, but the story does go on. What I've learned so far is that Rick Aggrin is a communicator, a listener, a reciter, a writer, a promoter, a recorder, a teacher, a supporter, and many more things of poetry. Please welcome Rick Aggrin. I was going to say, repent, but we'd have to repent first. So we'll skip that part. I was raised an atheist, so it's very strange to be up here, and I really like it a lot. When I met a woman with one blue eye and one green eye, I knew her life like my own. I have different sized feet. One small foot and one smaller foot leave me rocking back and forth like a boy with a big decision. The shoes that fit I wear forever, while the ones that don't, I hobble around in. Never know which foot will do the sacrificing until it's doing it. Sometimes I can hide it the way I skip or glide, but if you know me, you can tell my dance from my limp. I grew up in New Hampshire, Massachusetts in North Carolina and lived by a big cornfield in Massachusetts and crows often sang me awake in the morning. Crow milk. You might say crows watched over me, taking turns walking the rails of my crib, singing, heads bobbing, black throats rippling. At sunrise, they carried me wild purple grapes. We shared black raspberries on the thorn in the evenings. A mesh of sugar in our voices wove us loosely into a family. Unseen toreadore, a black Angus bull charging every red leaf falling from a sugar maple. And actually, I saw that on my way to the airport in Manchester, New Hampshire in a suburb. I looked over and there was a bull running circles around a little maple tree. And I was like, I don't know how that bull got into that suburb, but I wish I could stop and find out. A chivory is, I don't know if you've ever grabbed a wooden spoon in a pot and had a little parade in the kitchen when you were a kid, made a racket. That's often a chivory. A chivory is often the happy new year or the surprise of happy birthday. It's a big racket, a big celebratory racket. And in some cultures, it's the interruption of the honeymoon nuptials by your friends, which is not that nice. Chivory, deep in the leaves, minding my own business. And along comes this young farm girl. Her eyes are blue as cornflowers, like cutouts, and the sky comes through the back of her head. Her knife shines in the sun and I am picked. Pronounce cute and perfect and off I go. My insides feel funny. She's pulling them out. Her knife is sharp, but her hands are warm. She cut me some eyes that I'd been missing. I see an orchard out back, apples bowing the branches. I see how happy I make her. She fairly glows. She cuts me a nose and I smell fall leaves, the rose and her perfume and corn ripening. She cuts me some ears. I hear a brook running over its stones, a horse in the pasture browsing cricket song in the grass. Lastly, she cuts me an ear to ear grin and I find I'm pretty pleased I ain't no pie. With a candle inside, I'm nice and warm. There's a seed left in me and it's starting to itch. This has a little, need a little musical explanation. John Cage is an experimental musician, composer. He recently turned 100, his birthday, he would have turned 100 a couple of years ago. He danced with Merce Cunningham, his sweetie, who was also an experimental dancer. Obligato for, and I'm not super musical, but I think that is sort of a repetitive undertone of something, it's a phrase that gets played regularly. Sort of voce is like quiet. So Cage wrote a song that was silence. It's four minutes and 33 seconds long and he copyrighted it. So this is called Celebration of Copyright at 100 on the occasion of John Cage's 100th birthday. John Cage composed 433, a transcription of silence. And he performed silence all over the world. As a composer, he listened and wrote nothing. A braille of Obligato transcribed into what he'd heard tell of. Tonight, our pianist raises the baby grand's fallboard, runs her green eyes down 52 untouchable ivory keys, ponders 36 ebony's, and the unscored knuckles, she won't crack. And we wait for something, anything to ring with a maestro's deference. She closes the fallboard at 430, rises and bows, her only improvisation. A century earlier, in a grove of calamander trees, elephants' trunks swung in unison, curling and uncoiling silently after a lioness's cough, sort of voce. A nearby ebony's dark heartwood whispers, leaves and shadows waver, a fanning of ears, a bull elephant's upraised tusks like a conductor. He wraps the shadow of his trunk around the ebony tree trunk, pulls his shadow inside out, pantomimes and disappears. The sound of his vanishing lived in a piano until John Cage discovered it, a half a world away on the Lower East Side playing a quiet opera of Dharma. Now you can download this silence for 99 cents and in true spirit, clap along one-handedly. You can play the encore. I moved to North Carolina when I was 13. I was a little hippy kid with long hair and flowered bell bottoms. They were not ready for me. My first meeting with a neighbor was this little kid named Dennis Denning. And he was like, yanky? And I'm like, what? He's like, yanky? And I'm like, huh? And he said, now you call me Rebellion. We supposed to fight. And I was like, I'm not fighting you. That war was over a long time ago. I'm not interested in that piece. See these flowered bell bottoms? But this poem came up, I was thinking about, I came from a family of a single mom where women stuck up for themselves and ran things. So I wasn't used to some of the southern protectiveness of young ladies and girls. It was very interesting for me culturally to see how big brothers took care of their little sisters. It was a really interesting lesson to me. And you could go and be stupid and your big brother would keep an eye on you. Cruising the Carolina countryside night. South of city limits, safe as she can be with her big brother, his newly licensed best friend and two girlfriends in the backseat of a tan, Chevy Impala convertible. Winging, bearded kisses, palm first into the summer night to the crickets and the kudzu and the cigarettes glow on the shack porches like a small town beauty queen elected by a pack of cousins. She tried to kiss the night alive. Her white coolots riding up her 15 year old butt, the quart of Miller Highlife growing warm and foamy between her knees as they cruise the tobacco flatlands until beer weary and wind blown. She sinks between her two friends and they all succumb to the evening's contagious honeysuckle sedative. Slumped against each other's tan and freckled shoulders, hair wind tangled and moonlight's lullaby. Kissing them all good night as they ride. This one's for my brother David. Smoky in the lost boy. Drowsy summer afternoon and my brother David followed his cat Smoky into the woods behind our old white house. He was two or three, woke early from his nap, tottered off while my mother slept on, the brook murmuring and whispering. He followed Smoky out over the stone wall and through the pine grove past some tall spindly grasses and into the blackberry patch, sometimes wobbling and falling, sometimes crawling where the prickers grabbed at the handmade sweater he wore, tugged at his cuff. Above him the brambles bent in long arcs, heavy with dark fruit and David my brother went through the mall, a little human croquet ball and his sweater was striped like the wooden post that is your final croquet destination. Smoky stretched out on the moss and slept, a white cat with a gray spot on his belly, a puff of smoke from which his name floated, his belly a pillow, his purr a small lullaby for a boy stuck in the bramble patch. Essay that I worked on, I went to the Vermont center to try and write some poems and poems are just not coming. I ended up writing beside the writing and writing some prose. This is a little essay I wrote. It's called Ms. Buckley, Langston Hughes and Muhammad Ali. Wokeness may be a new word in your vernacular. It's been bandied about and joked about and even co-opted but to me it simply means emotionally and psychologically aware. It means culturally literate. My first lessons in wokeness were in the culture wars of the 1960s and 1967, 68 and 69 where the years my young consciousness was raised. I learned a lot of stuff largely as a testament to my mom and the agron who worked for the NAACP in Boston. Ms. Buckley, Ms. Buckley, my fourth grade teacher and two black men, Langston Hughes and Cassius Clay. Ms. Buckley came bounding into my life after Labor Day when I was nine in the fourth grade. She's a big lean Irish lady originally from Boston. She drove a brand new 1969 Chevy Malibu. She never wore makeup but wore red lipstick. She had silver hair, a big laugh and blue eyes that twinkled when she was mad or making mischief and you could pretty much tell the difference with a glance. The first day of school she introduced us kids to what a miss actually was. Apparently a miss had her own last name and wasn't married and she liked folks not knowing if she were a miss or a missus. She wasn't, it wasn't any of their business unless she wanted to make them any the wiser. Our first miss made her point pretty cleanly. So boys, raise your hands if you wanna give up your last name when you marry. We all looked around and none of us really did. At nine and 10 we weren't even really considering marriage. Only a few of us even liked girls period. The girls watched the informal polling and amusement but then miss Buckley asked the girls to raise their hands on the question. They looked around too. They seemed like they might like to discuss it a little. They've been thinking about it in a way that none of us boys had. It looked as if none of them were up for abandoning their last names either. Her point was taken. Nobody talked to us kids like that. It was the first day of school in fourth grade where you learn where the pencils and paper are, the workbooks, you figure out where they keep the paste and tape, where the sharpener is. A little Italian kid asked, could we just call you missus Buckley? It's just easier because that's what I'm used to. Maybe easier for you, Miss Buckley said seriously and paused. She looked all around surveying us, all of us, 18 little kids in our first day sneakers and new clothes but it's not accurate. Part of growing up is learning to be accurate with names. You call people what they want to be called and I prefer miss Buckley. I told my mom about all this at dinner and I'm pretty sure my mom became a miss that day too. It was because of miss Ann Diagren, my mom, that my sister integrated Brookline, New Hampshire, a small town in 1967. The year Langston Hughes died. Mom and dad, a wasp and a Jew decided to adopt a little black kid from Boston. It was still illegal for blacks and whites to marry in Massachusetts then and my mom worked for NAACP. People were just starting to say black, just starting to say Afro-American. My little sister Nancy integrated our town when she was four. She is no radical, no freedom writer but her standard issue, punky little sister. I was a proud nine-year-old big brother and she, simply a kid with a big smile, big curls and a runny nose. My mom explained that what people were called was powerful, colored, black, African, Afro-American, Negro and nigger. She warned me that some people, I don't know why this gets me, man, oh God. She warned me that some people would call my sister that and I should tell them they were wrong to do it. Nine-year-old fighter. Cassius Clay was the new boxing champion of the world and was also changing his name. He did not want to fight in the Vietnam War. He renamed himself Muhammad Ali. He was now a black Muslim and was a conscious objector who didn't have to fight because his new religion said not to kill people. This was strange for most white people because fighting was his job. What it came down to was he wanted to be his own boss. This was an interesting lesson in autonomy. Miss Buckley was teaching us poetry and we learned about Langston Hughes that spring. She could tell that I needed some help explaining my black sister and my family to people and Langston Hughes was going to help. He had written for a black newspaper in Harlem and his column he tried to explain white people to black people and vice versa. Along those lines he'd written up home. Miss Buckley, why Miss Buckley wanted me to memorize it and then tell it to the class. It was short and easy. My mom shares the story for me about that time. She overheard me at nine defending my sister at the beach, the beach where our skin stood out the most. So it was most matter-of-factly that a kid said to me, your sister's a nigger. My mother looked over to see if I needed reinforcements. Well, she's a negro to me. I replied calmly and swam off into the deeper water. The kid I left behind couldn't swim over his head. At school it was time to share my poem. It was called motto and it goes like this. I play it cool and dig all jive. That's the reason I stay alive. My motto as I live and learn is dig and be dug in return. Gary, the same kid who wanted Miss Buckley to be called Mrs. now wanted to know what digging was. I explained that to dig was simply another word for understanding and really I've been trying to explain that wherever I can ever since that day. What it comes down to is understanding each other. A few weeks later, Gary brought a 45 RPM record to school for show and tell. He wanted Miss Buckley to explain it to him. Miss Buckley fired up a little portable turntable, put on the record, dropped the needle carefully. It was the first time most of us heard Johnny Cash and he was singing a song called A Boy Named Sue. Unveiling. My parents met my sister on the drop tailgate of a used blue Plymouth Valley station wagon. A cold February day 1967, spitting sleet. The meat was off Route 128 and orange and blue roofed Howard Johnson's motor lodge. An adoption agent, more like a smuggler than a stork pulled up next to them. With a knowing nod to my mom, she rolled down the tailgate window with a vigorous crank, lowered the tailgate revealing a wicker laundry basket. Sleet ticked off the car roof, bounced and scattered, speckled my parents in a green, red, blue, black, plaid wool blanket. My father, imagining a little Korean girl he wanted, slid the basket out into the storm. Three adults hauled around to block the cold gusts of wind. My sister unwrapped like Petty Shoe, like a late Christmas present. A little half Moses, a float, a half Nubian queen, a sleep, a slant and creaky wicker, no flicker of wakefulness available and then a squint and a wiggle. My dad thought surely they brought the wrong child. He commenced, refolding her wordlessly into her cocoon, but my mother fell deeply and immediately in love with this little brown baby. My sister to be, the mistake who keeps teaching the world how to love. My birthmark, a cocoa brown birthmark on my stomach, slightly right of center if you're me, right is left of center if you're you. No, I got that backwards. About the same size as a Brazil nut, my favorite nut for cracking, nigger toes, this kid Brett called them. What? I never heard that. He assured me, everyone calls them nigger toes. I always caught tigers by the toe when I played Eenie Meenie Miney Mo. Brett caught niggers. Everything I learned about niggers in the fourth grade was Brett's illumination of darkness. I'd had a black sister for two years and I'd never heard anything about niggers, fortunately. That birthmark at my center, it was exactly my sister's color as if we'd been painted from a common palette. Paint dabbed on me, marked me six years before she was born, the spot of which I was ashamed until I matched her perfectly and it was reborn into a new orbit. This came, this was around a birthday. I was talking to my students in class, they'd never heard the word octaroon. And there is this weird classification in the racializing of slavery and captivity. One drop of black blood make you black, but one drop of white blood would not make you white. It's a very strange and unscientific rule, but if you were an eighth black, you were called an octaroon, a quarter black, a quadroon. I don't know why I got used to thinking about a fractionalized person, I guess. Blackbird fractions, this is called blackbird fractions. I'm an eighth blackbird, a smudge swirl, a crow's eye looking for sparkle shine, wreckage, an omniscient distance. I'm an eighth vetivier, combed and clustered, roof thatch and ear dab, I feed horses, strengthen bricks, I perfume necks and cisterns. I'm an eighth mermaid, a complex surface, warmth, cooled, a wanton impossible, an explosion, a salt opera with seafoam. I'm an eighth grapefruit, a citrus crystal ball, a pink cheek future teller, an inner-turned starlight, rose, corona and quench. I'm an eighth ormaloo, toxic and mercurial, fire sheeted, a glossed bronze goblet, a gilded dog fang, highlight, sheen and shine. I'm an eighth bastard, slant starved, an abandoned basket of baby, a wanderer, a staggerer, a hand and cheek offerer, half home and half alone. I'm an eighth peony, I'm ant circled, closely furrowed, then full blown, a pink blossomed nose full, a lost fist full, wind blasted and path dappling. What crows taught me? How to use my voice, when to warn the others, how to read what the tilt of a head says, how to harvest the massacre and keep to the side of the road, how to wear a shadow cloak and dodge a stone, how to skip when I steal and eat dove among thorns, how to sleep with one eye peeled, how to flee the scene, when to lull up, when to dive, when to raise one wing and bow. Two more, that's it, I'm doing all right. One long, one short one. My mom is 93 and she's headed out of this world, probably sometime in the next few months. I went to spend a month with her recently and hard to tell when she's ignoring people cause they annoy her or when she's just like legitimately checked out. And her timelines, as a demented person, her timeline and her lexicon are disconnected. She's really very ethereal and is back and forth between time periods. She's yelling at my brother cause her mom had come to visit her and given her a hug and my grandma's been dead since the 60s but she's like, you told me, you told me my mom was dead and she came here and gave me a hug and my brother's like, okay, okay, I'm glad, mom. She pretends not to hear those who annoy her in the old bone hotel dining room. She nods her head and choose her chicken, cut in meat bites for her. She eats as if in deep meditation as if counting her steps down to the brook long ago or down to Long Island Sound, hand in hand with Verne who will leave to fight in Italy while she finishes her chicken or high school, whichever comes first. Or perhaps she's counting steps in the dark down the hall to find the hall's end and its door or her mother who her son had told her was dead but stopped by to share with her a hug and some comfort. With her son by the koi pond, her heavy-litted eyes flutter in the sun as the spotted turtle's bee of adventure inscribes the pond's surface, the weave of her head following. It scribbled progress between whirls and eddies of colored carp and lily pads from her royal blue golden wheeled chair. She may be on a deck chair, leaving Brooklyn Harbor for Long Island Sound on a sailboat with Manny and Helen, the sun clean, the jib sail belling as they run before Montauk bound wind. She meditates on her chocolate ice cream as I play at refilling her spoon when she's not looking between reverential bites, like a game of chocolate peek-a-boo. And she's fascinated by abundance, fan by the waterfall, twirling pinwheels in the garden bed, spinning their precision, studying their spin. She's studying their spin with the precision of a toddler in her crib, a mobile of ruby-throated hummingbirds and golden butterflies above the blue wind-up music box of the world, winding down to its last few pinned notes before she sleeps. And I feel outgrown, like a pink baby blanket, the one she covered me with 58 years ago, outgrown, either able to cover her feet or her chin, but sadly, not both. Thanks so much, Mary and Allison and David and all the fun now and all the folks who made backstory backstory. It's been a really great time this past month with you guys. You be the rain and I'll be a puddle surface. You be the quiet. I'll be the chickadee at 4 a.m., a black-capped declaration at dawn. You be the earth. I'll be the beat glowing in the ground, the ant sowing a thistle seed. You be the wind and I'll be your hair blowing behind you, the candle high behind the wavery glass. You be the fire and I'll be the beach twig, the pine needle, a wisp of perfumed smoke rising. Thank you, Rick. Our next author is Elena Giorgio. I first heard her a couple years ago for poem city event and she was reading poetry and since then she's written a book of short stories called The Immigrant's Refrigerator. So that's mostly what I have on my mind. I've been reading it by a window and I find it quite moving and I also laugh out loud sometimes at the wit and sometimes I just stop at the end of a story and just have to sort of be quiet and stare for a while and not move on to the next one. So it made me think of a couple of things. How we look at things. In, there's a book called Jazz that is Matisse's, A Book of Cutouts. And in it Matisse quotes Renoir as saying, when I have arranged a bouquet for the purpose of painting it, I always turn to the side, I did not plan. And this serves as a reminder to look at the other side of any arrangement. Some of you may have walked around this church and some of you maybe haven't, but if you haven't then you might assume that this building is all white. But maybe if someone guided you around it or after today you might walk around or be compelled to look at it on all four sides. And you'll find out that the back of this church is red. And what's on the cover of your program is the back of the church. So in her poetry and prose, Elena Dorgue takes the reader all the way around from the front all you might see or presume at first glance to be one way. To the backside, the view most could never have guessed. She does this cleverly, poetically in her fiction as well. And at a case that allows you to keep up even when the going may feel difficult. She lights the way with incredible language and walks you through with specifics on occasion using dialogue in both the outer voicings and the interior thought processes of her characters, her speakers. She even weaves wit into the dark areas. I've noticed the magic in her poetry before and now with her new book of short stories, The Immigrant's Refrigerator, I see how marvelously she writes creative fiction, creating in her stories what to me seem like distinct fictional documentaries that as a whole collected together begin to show us the many sides inside and out of the very real world, the very real lives we may not have seen before. Please welcome Elena Dorgue. Thank you to Mary for inviting me and Alison and Dave, can you hear me okay at the back of the room? So this is an okay thing, okay. All right, so I did prepare a selection of things and then I came to the church and thought, oh, well I've got a story that has a scene in it in a church in Vermont from the days and I've never read it and I'm in a church in Vermont on the days and I probably never be in this position again. So I'm gonna read it, so here's the thing. Even though it says short stories, most of them are quite long. So I can't, I will, this is what I plan to do. I plan to read from three pieces from this book. Two of them are the shortest pieces so that I can get to the end for you. So at least you have two pieces where you get beginning, middle and end. But then the church bit that's in Vermont is actually something like 30 pages long. So what I'll do is I'll just read the beginning and then I'll flip to the sermon and then if you wanna read the rest of the story, you have to buy the book. So do you. And then because it's poetry, it's supposed to be a poetry event, I could read two or three poems or something like that. It's not, it's anything. It's anything I want to do? Okay, I'm just very sort of aware, Mary, that it's five to four and I believe we're supposed to be finishing in five minutes, right? Well, we started late so it was. So 15 minutes or something? It's 20, 25 minutes. Oh, okay, well, I don't wanna push it because if you need to stand up and like, because your bum hurts a little bit on this, so if you need to wiggle around, feel free. It's fine if you just read from. Okay, all right, okay. Okay, so this is the short story that's set in Vermont and it's called Pork is Love and I'm just gonna read the opening and then I'll jump to the church bit, okay? So, I'm gonna go in. No. It began as a challenge. I walked up to her at the end of the service and I said, poetry, poetry, blah, blah. If you want to convince me of love, then you'll stop reciting poems from the pulpit and you'll find a way to preach a sermon about pork fat. I was already standing in the doorway shaking her hand. If you could find a way to preach pork fat is love, then I'll come back to church to hear what else you've got to say. Her body expanded. She looked taller, wider, stronger. Oh, Lord, I thought she's gonna try to meet it. She's gonna do her damnedest to find a way to preach about pork fat and love. You know why? Because she thinks she's got God on her side. While she went home to study her Bible feed the hungry or do whatever else pastors do on Sunday afternoons, I thought, well, I have my own sacred ritual waiting for me at home. Pork is God to me. A useful God, one that can add flavor to practically everything and make it taste better. Even ice cream. I bought myself a cone with a scoop of maple bacon ice cream in Cape Cod last year. On the last vacation, me and Cassie took together. Bits of bacon in my ice cream made me happy. If the world were cooked in pork fat, I think it would be a happier place. But the Muslims don't eat it. And there are a whole lot of them. And the Jews don't eat it. And there are plenty of them. And the Hindus are all vegetarians and there are masses of them. And the atheists and the agnostics are multiplying these days and they both have more than their fair share of vegetarians. So pork goes out the window there. And then there are the environmentalists who want to save the planet with meatless Mondays. So right there, I can add a whole bunch of people to my personal list of the godless. Thank God for meat-eating Christians. Thank both gods, the one in heaven and the one at the trough. So anyway, so the man and the pastor have this. So his wife has left him and he becomes reclusive and he hasn't got anybody to talk to and he goes to the pastor and tries to talk to her and she tries to listen. And then at some point she says, all right, I'll do it. I'm gonna try and do this pork fat is love thing. So because I've never done it before. Oh, here we go, here we go. When the pastor stood in the pulpit, the church fell silent. Good morning, I hope you're all feeling well and ready to embrace this new day. Prepare yourselves for something a little different this morning. As she walked towards the days, there was a tiny bit of fidgeting from the congregation. In the center of the raised area, she'd already placed a hostess cart and she positioned herself behind it. From the second shelf of the cart, she pulled out a small camping stove and a frying pan. She placed the burner on top of the cart and set the pan on top of that. She lit the burner and suddenly all eyes were on the flame. This morning, I want you to think of God's love as this blue flame and this frying pan as the world we inhabit. The congregation sat transfixed waiting for her next move. She pulled out a piece of meat, a slab of pork I snicked. The town clerk looked around to register who'd made the sound. I wanted to stick my tongue out at her like some overgrown kid, but instead I gave her the evil eye and she whipped her head around to the front. Imagine yourself as this piece of pork, said the pastor. Some people laughed, some people froze. I thought I was going to burst. She held up the raw meat like a magician and made sure everybody got a good view of it before she tossed it into the pan. The pork sizzled. In this moment, sizzling meat in this church sounded like the loudest sound in the world. She moved the pork around the pan with a fork and spoke above the sound. When you are born, you are tossed into a life, a life that is sustained by the blue flame of God. If you do not watch over this flame, it will be extinguished. If you turn it up high, the meat will burn. If you turn it down low, it will take too long to cook and you run the risk of being left with something that is tasteless and dry. But if you turned to your life, keep turning yourself over and adjusting the temperature. The flame of God will transform you as this piece of meat is now transformed. The flame of God helps you to become something more than you once were, like this. She held up the cooked slab of pork in mid-air, its juices dripping. She had captivated the congregation with her sermon and the smell of pork. I had heard a growling stomach in the pew in front of me. I wanted to stand up and testify hallelujah for pork, but I didn't want to draw attention to myself. She put the pork onto a plate and began to slice it. As I cut up this meat, this plate fills with juice, full of goodness, something to save. How many of us save these juices in a jar by our stove to add to future recipes? After these juices cool and transform into something solid, fat, we go back to them, scoop them out, scoop out a helping to add to our future dishes, to give them more flavor, yes? I looked around, people were nodding in agreement. I wasn't alone. A short while ago, I read a poem to you about how easy it is to lose something we love, from something as small as a mother's watch to something as large as a continent. Today's sermon is about how we can keep something we value safe, something small like pork fat in a jar or something large like love in our hearts. We all know how easy it can be to lose something we hold dear, yes? So for this week, let us practice keeping something we love safe. When you look at that jar, a solid store of something you can dip into, something that a simple flame can melt, let pork fat remind you of love. She'd done it. She'd preached the sermon. No poetry, just pork. So that's not the end. It goes on a little bit more and there's a happy ending, which is unusual in this book, I will just let you know that. But okay, so the Immigrants Refrigerator, every story in it has an immigrant. Every story, not all the stories, not all the stories have Americans in it, but most of the stories have Americans in it. And all the stories have one aspect, sometimes to a larger degree as in pork, or you can barely notice it as in some of the other stories will have something to do with one item of food in it. So I said I was gonna read two short ones so that I could get through the whole thing. So I'm gonna read the first one. It's called Gospaccio. You know, I will just say, because this is called Backstory, I used to go walking with my neighbor a couple of years ago, a few years ago, and she's a pastor and she said to me that one of her parishioners had come up to her and said, I'm not coming back to church because all you do is read poems and I won't come back to church till you read a sermon about pork fat being loved. But she never did it, but I did it. So there's always something, and usually there's something in a story that triggered the idea. And in this next story, the thing that triggered the idea was I read about this man, whose job it was, to drive herces. I'll tell you more about it when I get to the end. It's called Gospaccio. Most days of the week, I stand outside the train station with two large plastic buckets of Gospaccio, nothing fancy, mostly mashed up watermelon, onion, cilantro, lime, more to quench their thirsts than to fill their stomachs. The boys come out from their corners. They are quiet. Like their bodies, their movements are small. In their eyes, I see the eyes of my own son. When they realize I have food, they simply say, please, senor. They don't need to ask. They're the reason I live in this border town. I'm here to feed them for the last time before they cross into the US or for the first time when they cross back into Mexico. In either direction, I know their journeys have been long. I want to feed them. I need to feed them. If I don't, who will? My heart, oh, my father broke it a long time ago. Because of this, when I feel another crack inside my chest, it frightens me. As good as my witness, I don't know how much heart I have left. Both my own history and these train boys are slowly grinding what is broken inside me into a dust. So I make soup. I cannot sleep when I think that the only thing these children will take into their bodies are the half-finished cigarettes that others tussle away. 14, 13, 12, friends, brothers, sometimes, not often, a girl. They are each other's trained family, rogue cousins, they ride on top of La Bestia. It is illegal, yes, but there is not much the authorities can do. How can they stop these traveling children when there are hundreds of them riding on train during work day each week? I was once one of them. I made it to the U.S. two times. Both times, I was sent back. After months in the Migrant Children Detention Center, I was happy to be returned to my mother. It didn't matter how good they were to me. It didn't matter how good I was at my lessons. I still felt locked up like they were keeping me in a prison. The first time I thought I did it, I made it, but that America was not like the one on television. TV America is everywhere in New York. After the first time I thought I would never ride La Bestia again, but I had to for my mother to build her a house with her own bedroom so she could stop selling food on the street. I wanted to put money in her hands and say, this is yours, no more cutting your own hair. I thought that finding my father in America would be the answer to everything. My plan was simple. I would tell him exactly where and how my mother and I had been living and he would help. Side by side, my father and I would work. Side by side, we would sign our names at the end of our letter's home. Father and son, we would send her our love and our money. At the end of my second journey on La Bestia, I found my father a miracle. He said, it takes more than one night with your mother to make you my son. He turned his back to me. He closed his doors and all the walls of my life already built on crumbling foundations would have fallen on top of me if I hadn't stepped sideways out of this old house and into the new. My mother died a year ago, five years after my last border crossing, but I'm still building a house for her in my head. I have counted the windows, 17. Also, all the rooms will be on the ground, no stairs, because I want this house to wrap around everyone who enters. The first time I went on the beast, I was lucky. I was part of a group, four boys and me. They protected me. We each took it in turns to stay awake and watch out for the others. All of us had been witnesses to the solo riders. We'd seen how many of them rolled close to the edge of the train while they were dreaming. When someone rolled off, the train stopped for a moment. My oldest rolled cousin saw someone roll under the train. He didn't tell us what he saw. He saw the dreaming boy's body was cut, how his legs landed a few feet away from his hands until the biggest part of our train journey was over and we were close to the U.S. border, the border in all of our dreams. We all thought that when we got to America, we would be adopted by new families, born again into the life we were meant for. Of course we thought we were meant for it. We were just the same as the New York boys on TV. Except their houses had kitchens as big as churches and refrigerators with so much food, sometimes things were piled on top of each other with a special place for eggs and cheese and meat. But now here I am, a 20-year-old father, a 20-year-old father who feeds these road cousins, Gus Butcher, when the train stops to catch its breath in the station. The rest of the day, I drive a hearse. This is my job for money. When I'm driving, hardly a day passes when I do not have to repatriate a child's body. This is what the authorities tell me to call it when they give me a dead train child to take back to his mother. There are so many days I've had to repatriate a child's body, it would be easy to lose count. I have not lost count. I have repatriated 257 children's bodies. Each time I load a small coffin into my hearse, a small country turns to dust inside me. I have a wife now. She came into my life with a child, my stepson. I love him like he is my own. I make sure to hold my boy every day. I don't want him to take a train till I'm worth it. I can't imagine my wife says. As she stands, I'm sorry, as she stands in the river washing our clothes. I'm smoking my first cigarette of the day before I have to drive a dead boy's, a dead boy back to his mother. I can't imagine, she says, how heavy it must be to carry the death of your child. It does not matter how many times my wife says, imagine, I do not imagine. I make gaspacho. When the train's engine comes to a stop, the cousins jump down from its roof and I step out with my two buckets. Their hunger ridds them of their fear of being out in the open. They form a line. I ladle my soup into their plastic cups. So that's the entire story, beginning, middle, and end. And I was saying that very often, these stories are sparked by one tiny little seed, that is a spark seed. Anyway, I was reading a story about the train, the children across the border on the train and then there was this one sentence tucked away in this massive article about the poor man, whose job it was to drive the bodies back to their mothers and that just stayed with me and that's what the story grew out of. So I'm looking at the time and I don't have time to read another one. So, when I planned what I was gonna read today, uncharacteristically of me, I thought that I wouldn't want to do this reading that was all about love and read love poems because it's been such a hateful week. So I would just like to read a love poem to you if that's okay, finish with a love poem. And I used to teach at Hunter College in New York City and part of my, I had many jobs, but one of my jobs was to go and pick up the photocopying for the English department and they gave me the wrong photocopying once and it was a questionnaire that the Romance languages, so that the Spanish and French and Spanish, right? Yeah, it was a questionnaire that they were gonna use to teach undergrads Spanish and this questionnaire was all about love and you were supposed to form into groups with complete strangers and share your most intimate details with these strangers and apparently this is gonna teach you Spanish and I was like, lava-gasted, so I stole the questionnaire and I made a poem out of it so I'm gonna read that one, what's it called? It's called a questionnaire on a foreign land. Okay, do you remember the first time you fell in love? Yes, wordless, standing inside an ambassador's door, sitting cross-legged on an American embassy's floor. I saw a two-deer behind eyes, I looked away. They told me they were galloping from London to Paris. When they got to France, they thought Paris would be right there. I waited until the deer returned. My voice was low, African, American, a whisperer. Hyphens existed between continents and sounds. When you feel an attraction, which parts of the body catch your eye? 10 corresponds to the most attractive feature, one to the least. Eyes, nine, hair, nine, neck, seven, legs, five, shoulders, six, back, seven, teeth, two, lips, eight, chest to slash, breasts, seven, belly, six, hands, nine feet, six, skin, eight. What was the person like described physical features and personality? Inside hair follicles were songs about lions. Arms carried caries away from the shore. I had to lean close to here. I gave thanks for whispering. Hyphenated bodies united. We founded the courage to enter the Atlantic and swim. If you are in love now, circle the symptoms you display. I didn't make up the questions, these are for real from the questionnaire. I just made up the answers. A jalopy becomes a transcendent chariot. Telephones become instruments of love. You leave the city to build a stone house in the wilderness. War feels distance. Time is concurrently urgent and unimportant. Tears become a tangible representation of God. Poverty feels simultaneously real and unreal. You can't eat. You discover a portal that leads to a new alphabet. You can't sleep. I circled them all. Similarly, love is like an element of nature, snow. A geographical area, a canyon, a season of the year, autumn, food or drink, watermelon juice, furniture, a chest of drawers, an animal, a seahorse, a plant, a vine. Use your ideas to create a love poem. If we expressed your feelings, how did you do so? If not, why not? I did not. I could not. Garmé and gold adorned one finger. Some enchanted evening was experience, not song. But my telephone kept making me dial the number. When the phone rang, I counted the rings before I hung up. When love happens, cut watermelon into a canyon of snow, melt red, collect it, in drawers, in chests, autumnal seep horses, weave umbilical vines, a botanical net, we're caught. We traveled across borders, lines, angles, curves. We studied the geometry of our knees. So I'll end there. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Elena. Thank you, Rick, both for coming today. That was wonderful. Thank you, everybody, for shivering a little bit with us. And the first Sunday, I had sandals on, and it's a little different today. But I hope you can join us down at the Kent and talk with Rick and Elena, and we'll have some refreshments. And it should be a little warmer there. And we have their books, if you'd like to purchase them. So thank you.