 This is called Bridges and Crossroads. WPA Bridge over the Neosho. I stood on it in full flood with my dad, the water just kissing the underside of the boards, river mones shivering up my legs. It stood until a flood licked out the footings. They replaced it, but when I dreamed the Neosho, the old bridge is there. They took the zinc out until they hit the daylight of Third Street. You could see the crack in the pavement. It looked like another pothole and there was sunlight in the mine. Sunlight just there with the dull ache of lead and the grim scowl of Jack. Those cotton mouths know some songs too. They know some fish songs. And once crossing Tar Creek Bridge, a grandma snake got hit by a pickup. And in her last breaths, we drove up on her there like a burning library, her songs falling away in curls. Taken by updrafts like smoke prayers near the water. She looked me in the heart and whispered just the one secret. What a lot of people don't know about the Ani and Wea people, my father's people, is that we pray at water. That's where we go to pray. And you see the theme I'm going with here. I decided that rather than going with misery, I'd talk about praying. And it's called Morning Song and it's usually done at dawn by Living Water. Grandma New Rivers. It's just a river, but the name trips me up. The bridge is the mythology of Red 66 and all of the family stories that run these shores. Stories running to the Missouri, to the Mississippi and to the Gulf Coast. It's just a river. But my dad fished it. We've seen buildings floating in the floodwater, seeing whole trees yearning southward. It's just a river. But my grandma chose it and she knew rivers because poems live dangerous lives. I can't write the vanished poem, the murdered poem she slips from under my pen off of the pages in my notebook and every planned word needs new words. Last scene alive, the murdered poem, the vanished poem was somewhere she shouldn't have been like walking or breathing or trying to see herself somewhere else. The vanished poem was caught on CCTV in Vancouver, Atlanta, Albuquerque, leaving work heading home. The murdered poem never got there. Because poems lives are dangerous. Because every poem's a potential headline along Highway 16. These poems run to Prince George or somewhere else. And if a poem steps off a cliff while avoiding the police and if it can't fly, then police can't find it. It takes family, community, and I still can't write her. Route 66 was the river we all lived with, knowing its habits and fauna, the sacred diners and cafes on its shores and the seasonal overflow, overflow. There's a mythology there that blurs between cultures. No Fred Harvey, but it replaced the railroad. Next food, second floor, the big teepee. And sometimes a hawk, not quite dead on the blacktop. The one that marked me with a clenching foot, a reflex between French toast scrambled eggs, cubed ham, and tangy coffee. When I still smoked cigarettes and grandpa had a bronze American leviathan, the whorehound drops, jerky moccasins gas, and the incandescent constellations of towns at night, each telling their very own stories, unknown to us. So many ghosts along this river that we share these pinpricks of similarity, these hauntings, this long man, such crime, such home place. You know what? I'm gonna have this be my last one. It's called Thieves. We who steal ourselves back from the songs, laws, and habits that claim us and everything about us. The long man, the wide hip, generous bays, protective as any mother. We who can still hear Lovejoy's press can hear it from under the water, the supervisory singing wolves. We who sing to other songs, who steal ourselves back, the kidnapped, hostage, unransomed, unranslable. We learn songs to pick locks, to absorb your laws and habits. We're coming for ourselves. We're on our way. Thank you so much for being here with us tonight. Thank you.