 You know how when you date, you have what are they called? Dealbreakers. One of my dealbreakers is that if you can't survive the zombie apocalypse, then I cannot date you because, you know, well, for obvious reasons, right? Thank you, Kim, so much for inviting me. I am excited to be reading with you in your company. And just love that reading just now. That was amazing. Wish I could just sit and marinate for a little while on it. It's beautiful. I'm going to read two things. They're both lyric essays. One of them is in progress and very new. The other one actually just got published by Alicat Books, which I'm really excited about. That's right. You have to get close, i.e. buy it, which, of course, I have none of. But you can get it at Alicat Books. All right. Marriage of infinity tropes and mythology, self-portraits through the lens of my favorite books. One, skin of the soul. The first encounter with the wolf is his self and wilderness. For a time you live on 18th and Cap Street, a corner where everyone is gnawing at something. The story is like so many others, one in every six. This tired trope, a father pretending to fix something. His hand entering the garbage disposal in the same way men's hands enter things they should not. And the daughter fantasizing dismemberment. Two, the god of small things. The monsoon of childhood is where we sometimes find ourselves tethered, regardless of nation of origin. No passport for the kind of being that you are. For another child, all darkness and skin, the sound of her ancestors telling stories that are still reverberating within the molecules of water that make up the sorrow of rivers and eventually the sea. How even the most mundane things can be ruined. In another story it is the popcorn and a boy and the sound of sticky floors that for the rest of his life will make him feel like doing cartwheels on ceilings. How people imagine public places are safe. Greyhound buses, churches, and movie theaters. Most terrible things happen in our own homes. The boy will make an art out of leaving his body. There are birds that are both scavengers and birds of prey. Gip-na-gips, California's, and Gips, Indicus. The way two worlds can collide. Like when a friend's lover is a victim and a perpetrator, a truth that scorches every bit of earth between you. Three, fledglings. The baby girl of otherness is a vampire. Neither the living nor the dead claim her. She is a perpetual, new topic of conversation and the proof. She's a type of creature that in a different time might have been taken on tour. That greasy question still on everyone's lips. What are you anyway? When the question of your blood makes you the saddest celebrity, here comes the tolerance carnival. You could be a komodo dragon. You don't have to run away to be part of the circus. How many times has someone named you exotic? She once dated a birder who was fond of noting that it is difficult to identify seagulls because of their prolific miscegenation. Miscegenation. He elongated the word. He liked the sound of it in his mouth. Miscegenation is teratology as memory thief. Four, schizophrine. Those that don't fit in will find themselves among a collection of ghosts where bones speak a minimum of two languages. It means you cannot possibly be American. The Jehovah witness said my mother was speaking in tongues of frogs and lizards. Mothers sometimes give birth to fragments. In this, you will never be an only child. They will say that mothers are ill. A word with a root history meaning wicked with hostility. Mothers are at times merely dysphoric. Mother, her mother, her motherland. The first and the last story goes something like, it was too far to walk to the hospital. So they let her rest beneath a magnolia tree. They lost her, they say. Is it really possible to lose someone? A familiar transmutation is when we lose our minds. Magnolia flowers are described as solitary and terminal, born from ancient trees that have been with us longer than bees. Upon hearing this, everyone will be incredulous. But it's true, some trees are pollinated by beetles. It is possible to exist because of a terrible creature. It is possible to do terrible things, epilogue. Wolves in stories aren't always to blame. They also lick wounds. So my little chapbook is called A Brief History of the Selfie. And I'm not going to read you the whole thing, but I'll read you most of it. There is an epigraph at the beginning and an epigraph at the end. They're both by D. N. Arbus. The opening epigraph is, I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them. The first selfie may have been a daguerreotype. The process was slow, as is with most things, it captured the soul. It was 1839, and Robert Cornelius was looking at himself. Once the image was printed, he wrote on the back the first light picture ever taken. The selfie has been criticized with the same fervor with which society criticizes young women. I love a selfie that speaks in tongues. It seems right that we should be our biggest fan and our own paparazzi. In 2012, selfie became a hashtag. Time magazine included hashtag selfie in its list of buzzwords that year. Lionel and I started exchanging selfies long before that year. The first selfies sent were of my feet, never bear. He sent selfies of his hands. We met in 1999. In 2013, the Oxford English Dictionary added selfie to its canon and called it the word of the year. Lionel and I have exchanged selfies at ridiculous rates and then lolls occur. We eventually break these absences after accusing each other of being the one that stopped. There's a tenderness after each loll. Eminem took a selfie with the Mona Lisa. Albrecht Durer painted his first selfie at the age of 13. Danny Trejo took a shirtless selfie on the DC state capital steps after he voted. Kim Kardashian West is a selfie fiend, a major contributor to the sexy selfie criticized for her selfies with the fervor previously mentioned. In the jungle, Creston McCawks found a nature camera and took selfies, the most stunning one of a female smiling directly at the viewer. The McCawks took over 30 selfies in total. This act, of course, led to a legal debate as to whom owns the image. The most controversial images in Western art history have been of female nudes. At the unveiling of Manet's Olympia, women fainted. Men beat the painting with their umbrellas. It could have been Olympia's brazen gaze. The artists of female nudes almost always men, male artists of the female nude are criticized, and yet their work is placed in the canon for eternity. Of the criticisms of her naked selfies, Kim Kardashian West has said, enough is enough. The average lifespan of a person is 27,375 days. They say the average millennial is expected to take 25,700 selfies during their lifetime. There have been concerns about beauty and the ruin of lives and other human dilemmas. Is it narcissism or self-love? Never enough discussion about the gaze. This isn't new. Everyone has something to say about what people want to say about themselves. The mirror we know today was invented in 1835. It was also called the looking glass. Before the looking glass, we were still looking into still dark pools of water. There is a selfie of Lionel and me in a trailer in upstate New York. We look cold. We are wearing many layers of clothing. We are wearing matching plaid robes. We are standing in front of a heater. We look terrible. It was a beautiful day. I'm going to stop there and I'm going to close with the epigraph at the end. A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know. Thank you.