 It's about 12.12, so we'll get started in a minute or so. First of all, welcome. Welcome back to Morrison. It's wonderful to see you here. And a big welcome to Jake Skeets, who's joining us from Oklahoma. A brief thanks to our sponsors, the library as always, to the Arts Research Center. And I want to stress that due to a partnership with them, Jake's actually going to be giving a public craft talk this afternoon at 4 p.m. So if you're able to join us then, Jake will be speaking in the Mod Fife Room in Wheeler 315. I'll mention that again at the end. And thanks to Pegasus Books. Callie is joining us over there. If you haven't a copy of Jake's book, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, it's really, really exceptional. And you can pick one up over there. And I think Jake will have time to sign afterwards. Lastly, if you could silence your cell phones before we start. So the title Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers arrests us. That image, without its context, which I'll try not to spoil, is a little hard to see. There's a face implied, and eyes, and a mouth. But they blur beneath the strangeness of Bottle Dark, the centrist flowers. These elements are in tension with each other, the man-made and the natural. And that tension lands in the human face. The image also sets up a subtle circuit between sight of the bottles and speech of flowers. A post-industrial dark is perceived, but flowers emerge from the mouth. This kind of compression, boundary crossing, and beauty are the syntax of Skeets' book. Some sections are just a few words long, and again and again we see people composed of or turning into landscape. In a poem of passion, his veins burst elk black, or later lightning leaks from lip. But landscapes signifies also, as it always does, the toll of history. In Skeets' poems, this means the train, the truck wrecks, the train crushes, the racist violence, the alcoholism that manifests as the tangible effects of a continuous history of native genocide. In Eyes Bottle Dark, these take on the structuring force of an origin myth. An uncle's fate is refracted throughout the book in many forms. And the litany of the alcoholic dead, bitten by exposure, weaves into the desert they perish in. Woven also into the landscape this book so sensitively tracks is language. Sometimes this manifests as in love poem, as a rapturous word intoxication, an exultation in rich associations. You sip from the delta near my tongue, ossuary deepens at the clavicle. But as this line hints, language is not static, but an agent, an event, in Skeets' poetry. Ossuary deepens, or elsewhere, letters spill out. And the book's interest in dismemberment, decomposition, and wrecking extends also to its thinking about the gap between speech and writing. It's letters, not words, that spill out. Later, the letter T vibrates in the cottonwoods. And in a small poem, which I think I can find here, a small poem, dogs' maul remains like white space does. Notice the whiteness of that space. And yet this breaking apart so often feels like freedom in Skeets' poetry. Alcohol soaks almost every scene of intimacy. And still the language of those moments is breathtaking, elliptical, precisely felt, tender. So make no mistake, the content of this book is tragic. Bottlecap eyes. Despite and because of this, its poems are ecstatic, its images fugitive and mysterious, flowers in the mouth. It's a book that braids elegy and love, remains permeable to others and the world, despite its wounds, and convinces itself and us in poem after poem of the transcendence, however brief, of beautiful speaking. Please join me in welcoming Jake Skeets. Thank you. That was a great introduction. I wish I could catalog or archive the kinds of introductions I hear, because that was really great. Thank you. Humble to be here. Hello. I'm Jake. And I'm honored to be here at this podium. I recognize it from all the YouTube videos I watched when I was learning how to write poetry, coming into poetry. So it's honored to sort of be here. And I'll be reading some poems for you all today. To start, I think I want to read actually some new work. And then I'll transition into the book and then I'll end with some more new work. This one is called Blue Bark. Blue Bark. Wasps formed in a dawn elsewhere from bird or waterlands where pine primordial, where topsoil cribbed mud black mist. Its first skies more blue bark. An everlasting body against the brush. From it appeared the first beetles and a grazing dawn. Burned against cedar water. The brush a lesser yellow all stick and shell. Abalone or corn seed dry sung. Another shell appeared and another. So that poem is in a, I guess, erasure, erasure poem, found poem that I took from sort of general history of Navajo people. It was written by some unnamed sort of anthropologist who was writing about, you know, where Navajo people come from. So I just went through and sort of took out phrases and words, sort of recreated in a way that feels more authentically Navajo than not. This one's called Coming Across a Horned Toad. When I saw a horned toad watch a wildfire on juniper, its eyes mattered a pitch and smoldered open. Its name sounds like small blood, a room full of breathing, a fire-caught voice, be holy somewhere. It leaves horizon suddenly, mountain carried into tongue, its memory veins dusk, bone spur, its moon trail touchlets, another cathedral, another paint coat cracking, another, another. It has a tin can for sky, settled in open prism, a prism between storm platelets and a god. I see still clouds over valley dirt afternoons in December when evening turns a dark shore, everything tall through the pinions. I take notes because it comes black, comes lunar, because the ash altered in spilled morning, because blooms, breathing, a white tree, ropesets, a river's winded teeth, placid silver and ankle deep. Under another holy sky of black dirt, I hear the morning shell blue and there a horned toad, its skin, its flat time, its spine, an arrowhead, pollen, sleet rain. It sings, mouthing a prayer, be holy somewhere. So we'll turn to the book. Some context. This poem mentions two places. So the first is Winderock, Arizona, which is the capital of the Navajo Nation, where I come from. And it also mentions a town called Drunktown, also known as Gallup, New Mexico, which I consider my hometown. And it's the primary setting of Eyes, Bottle, Dark. Let there be coal. One, a father hands a sledgehammer to two boys outside Winderock. The older goes first, rams a rail spike into the core, it sparks. No light comes, just dust cloud, glitter black. The boys load the coal. Inside them, a generator station opens its eye. A father sips coal slurry from a Styrofoam cup, careful not to burn. Two, train tracks and mines split Gallup in two. Men spit coal tracks rise like a spine when Drunktown kneels to the east. Three, spider woman cries her stories, coiled and warped and wool. The rug now hung in a San Francisco or Swedish hotel. We bring in the coal that dyes our hands black, not like ash, but like the thing that makes a black sheep black. Four, this is a retelling of the creation story, where Navajo people journeyed four worlds and God declared, let there be coal. Some Navajo people say there are actually five worlds. Some say six. A boy busting up coal in Wenderock asks his dad, when do we leave for the next one? His dad sits his coffee down to hit the boy. Coal doesn't bust itself. Drunktown. Indian, Eden, open tooth bone brews this town split into. Clocks ring out as train horns. Each hour hand drags into a screech. Iron, steel, iron. The minute hand runs its fingers through the outcrops. Drunktown. Drunk is the punch. Town, a gasp. In between the letters are boots crushing tumbleweeds. A tractor tire backing over a man's skull. Men around here only touch when they fuck in a back seat. Go for the fowl with 30 seconds left. Hug their sons after high school graduation. Open a keg. Stab my uncle 47 times behind a liquor store. A bar called Eddie's sits at the end of the world. By the tracks, drunk men get some sleep. My father's uncle tries to get some under long bed truck. The truck backs up to go home. I arrange my father's boarding school soap bones on white space and call it a poem. Like my father, I come upon death staggering into the house with beer on the breath. Mule deer splintered in barbed tendon. Gray highway veins narrow. Push, pull under teal and red heels. A man is drunk staggering into northbound lanes. Dollar bills for his index and ring fingers. Sands glitter with broken bottles. Greens, deep blues, clears and golds. This place is white cone. Greasewood, sanders, white water, red springs, crystal, chenlit, naslini, Indian wells and all muddy roads lead from Gallup. The sky places an arm under near heels. On the shoulder, dark gray, almost blue, bleeds into greens. Blue greens, turquoise into hazy blue. Pure blue. No gray or gold or oil black seeped through. If I stare long enough, I see my uncle in a mirror. The bottle caps we use for eyes. An owl has a skeleton of three letters. O, twists into L. The burrowing owl burrows under dead cactus. Feathers fall on horseweed and skull bone, blown open. So on the cover of Eyes, What a Dark, as it was mentioned, is an Avedon portrait. So Richard Avedon was traveling the western states in the 70s for his book in the American West where the goal or the project was taking images and portraits of people in odd jobs or what he considered odd jobs. So he took photographs of people working in the circus, of beekeepers, grave diggers, miners. And he traveled through Gallup in Mexico. And they actually took this picture there. And the subject is actually my uncle, Benson James. And the picture was taken on June of 1979 in Gallup. An Avedon sort of labeled the occupation of Benson a drifter. But unfortunately a year later, 1980, Benson was actually murdered in Gallup. And so in 1985, when the book was done, Avedon and his team sent a signed copy of the collection to my family. And they received it sort of five years after his death. And they had no idea that he had done this or no idea that Benson had given permission. So they were kind of just like confused that this book sort of showed up five years later of the picture of someone they had lost. And the image sort of took central focus as I was revising Eyes Bottle Dark. The book would have looked entirely different had I not come across it again as returning back home to the reservation and seeing it again for the first time as like an adult. So the book shifted at that moment. So this book, this poem sort of is in response to the photograph. Oh. Drifter. Drift. To drift is to be carried by a current of air or water, but men are not the teeth of their verbs. They pry nouns open with a belt buckle to take a sip. Drifter. A drifter carried by a current of air or water makes his way from one place to another. See vagabond. See transient. See drunk. See a man with shoulder length hair. Dollar bills fisted standing before a white screen. See his lips. How still. How horizon. How sunset. A train. Passing through. I try to hug him through the spine. Left on the white space, his face becomes a mirror if I stare long enough. My face charcoaled, pursed, squinting at the camera. Train horn punch shatters the mirror, frees him from the page. My uncle leaps from the dust storm. Sandburst shiver and outflow get at water coughed up. A snake contorts spackled, dark puddle lilac licked by heavy sun off smog sits. Gustrack did up with cold fronts. He sees his body like a dead one. Then as a mirror unbroken, thin as mosquito wing. Clouds glutton rain and tongues rope spun. Best put as desire, as marrow coiled in spine. As question marks unbuttoned, so letters spill out. Wasp eye corners heavy as wind unfurl into him. Gulp on parche, knots into sediments. Legs warp, diamonds wheel among cactus. Lightning leaks from lip. Thunder head crane down the beak punctures pinnacate beetle. Virga carried on its back. He turns him on his back before joints explode and into dust. Alkaline, fungi, wild carrot roots, sewn in strata, collect again on teeth. After party. We tank down beer. Eyelids lower and lower. He lets me feel beneath his basketball shorts. Sorrel feels along his thigh. Burrows in our bellies heavy and heavy from rolling rock and blue ribbon. Aluminum ghost coaxes his kiss. Candle left lit. He mouths the neck and lip of another bottle. Rifle cold. My tongue coils on the trigger before its click. Corn beetles scatter out, no longer his bones. Love poem, you stand by your car, man in meadow, now deep white. Slow teeth, slow ice. Fellow night footprints follow through stiff with each crunch in the snow. Frost crystals on my tongue. Your cheekbone cold against my face, a whirring rock, marrow deep. I open the word and crawl inside its spine. Barbed wire, a turbine with dark belly, coil hierarchy. What word, you ask? Your body a cloud flattened in my hand. Your body coiled with mine. Air snakes over ribcage, cracks into powder. I say thorn. I say mouth. Desire is criminal. You being here is criminal. You sip from the delta near my tongue, ossuary deepens at the clavicle. Eyes stutter open, limbs crepuscular over the bed frame. I watch you shower after tributaries, confluence, mineral stains. You rub the holy off your skin, your fingers in after soap, jaw white. Bent wasp hums behind your throats. In the iris, orange whispers into deep yellow slather. Uranium corrodes to spalling black. Speckles on hired horn. Your shoulder blades cock open, wings silt flight. Torso woven with sweat chocks down to bone. Skin can be too loud sometimes. You have the night's bristle. Yolk noose from pinumbra. I lick the railroad down your back. Admire black water in your hair. Before you go, I unburry the jaw. You swallow frozen sand. I say you can go now. You can go now. So I'm going to switch over to read some new work. Just so that there's a nice balance. Over the summer I read at the Institute of American Indian Arts and I sort of mentioned there that I would stop or retire from reading from Eyes Bottle Dark. But I keep getting invitations to read from it. It's carried so well for the past few years. It was, you know, published in 2019. I finished it in 2018. So it's been, what, four years now that I sort of been carrying it with me. And it's actually pretty difficult to sort of move into the book over and over again. You know, because the book deals with a lot of things that my family has gone through but also a collective memory of what my community has gone through especially around border towns like Gallup and New Mexico. And so it's interesting to sort of move in and out of it. And so it takes a lot of work to sort of do that work. So this new book that I'm working on I feel like is a sequel to it. But one that is more rooted in, you know, not things that are not as dark. Sort of this more becoming, learning how to become yourself and learning things like desire all over again. So I'll read just a few more from this new work and I'll switch back to the book. This one is called A Man Called After Dark. One, he crosses night, a field of wild antenna, fireweed and shedscale calling me through television static. His name is After Dark. He calls to me with the sounds of wet alligator juniper tells me my name with the beak break of a crow cocking its head to the south. The dirt beneath has teeth, long lead plant and salt bush, circuits of roots and stem gnarled from the mouth. Two, the man has mercury in his name, his head sky thick, not yet cloud nor rain. His skull is a shelf for white candles, an unlocked gun box, a half full fifth of dark matter, a late evening gnatsung, sweet as dark soil and wooftail. His frame mountaintops the meadow sleep grass as he carries into his pit the smoke of belt burn and nectarines and me. I will learn to love him so erosive it eats through the canyon like pink water. Three, the field stands taller when he turns key to engine and tells me he dances too many sorrows out the open windows of train cars. Jackrabbit's ash and model at the hem sewn with a sunken back road of flesh and hill slope. He drives off dusts the horizon as if chancel, as if sunrise, as if all of it, all its beauty. He said my name, this one I have to prepare for because it takes lots of reading. He said my name. He said my name is really a kiln, a hall of groundwater because a mouth can open into hot vapor. He said my name is actually a riverbed. He said to make of my name a choking of cracked ice. He said to say my name is old water in a ditch. He said to make of my name a peach tree on fire, a palm of pollen. He said my name is really an aquifer, an astrophil, an orchestra of damp tarps and a sheep corral, a downed pole in rock springs. He said my name is as tall as a smokestack. He said my name has a tendency to cause a draft to be a touch of tequila. He said my name is really splintered reed, heavy blue mornings in June. He said to make of my name wildfire smoke. He said to say my name is a rumor, the low beams of a pickup. He said my name is really a sermon of locusts, boulder rust in a river gorge. He said to make of my name a desert garden. He said my name is the one pink evening when you whisper your name to the moon and it whispers back a monsoon. This one is called Anthropocene a Dictionary, and it uses some Navajo in it, but the translation, I think, is implied. Anthropocene a Dictionary. The bech berun, sheep corral, juniper beams caught charcoal in the late summer morning, night still pooled in hoof prints, deer panicked, run from water, olje bena adenidine, moonlight. Perched above the town, drowned in orange and streetlamp, the road back home dips with the earth, shines black in the sirens, it's sails or it's wings. Driving through the mountain pass, dolly mountain bluebird swings out from swollen branches. I never see those anymore, someone says. Dios, wind, wind, more of it, more wind as in to come up. Plastic bags, driftwood defense line. N'hitsui, evening, somewhere northward, fire twists around the shrublands, sky dipped in smoke, twilight. There is a word for this, someone says. De diethlid, they burned it. Codelia, we did this. So I'll just read two more for you. Buffalo grass, barely mourning pink curtains, drape an open window, roaches scatter, the letter T vibrating in cottonwoods, his hair horsetail and snakeweed. I siphoned doubt from his throats for the buffalo grass. Seep Willow Antler, press against the memory of the first man I saw naked, his tongue a mosquito, whispering its name, a hymn on mosquitoes, my cheek. The things we see the other do collapse words into yucca bone, the Navajo word for eye hardens into the word for war. And I'll end with this poem here. The book starts out with a phrase in Denet that reads, Codon, Hojol, Donlay, which can be translated loosely. There's something like from here there will be beauty again. And I wanted to frame it as such because, again, the book is one that deals a lot of things that you don't necessarily want to remember. And I wanted to end with this one because it deals a lot with beauty. And I actually borrow several lines from the poet, D.A. Powell. When I read this line, we all are beautiful at least once. I sort of fell in love with poetry all over again. So I have a big, I just love that poem. I love that line. So I borrowed it, as his poets do. And I feel like it's a nice way to sort of end a collection like this where you're hopeful, end with the idea of hope. And I feel like the second book is sort of the continuance of that idea. So this poem is called In the Fields. In the Fields with Lines from D.A. Powell. We unyoke owl pellets for marrow in desert meadow. His mouth, a pigeon eye, a torch, a womb turned flower. He, still a boy dug from cactus skull, undresses into bark beetles. He unlearns how to hold a fist with my hand, bursts into dandelion seeds. We all are beautiful at least once. Mudwater puddles along enamel, eye teeth blossom into osprey. Our bones dampen like snow melt under squirrel grass. We could be boys together, finally, as milk vetch, tumbleweed, and sticker bush. We can be beautiful again beneath the sumac, yarrow, and bitter water. Yeah, thank you so much for having me here. Oh my god, thank you, Jake. That was really, really special. You're such a musician. And I don't know, I was struck even in the book by your love poems, but I really think some of those, your depictions of intimacy, some of the most stirring I've heard. So thank you. Thank you all for being here. We have books for sale, courtesy of Pegasus, and I think Jake may be so kind as to sign them if you're interested. One more thanks to the library, to Amber specifically, but to the support they offer this program, to the Arts Research Center, who Laura is here, and a reminder that Jake will be reading, giving a craft talk at 4 p.m. this afternoon in Wheeler 315. There's also, in closing, a email sign-up sheet if you wanna hear, stay in touch about Lunch Poems events. And you can revisit this event soon and all our past events on our YouTube channel. All right, so thank you by books, support the poets, and here Jake's craft talk this afternoon.