 How's everyone feeling? Yeah, it doesn't sound so good. How y'all feeling? Yeah, you got to give me some love, you know. How about that? I'm going to put a poem. So let's just get a little noise in here. So when I say love, what are you guys going to say? You're going to say love, OK? Love. Love. That's right. So I'm not going to read. I'm going to go rogue. I'm not going to read from the anthology. But you can read the work there. I'm going to read a piece. Yeah, exactly. So this is a new piece. I've been working on it. And I haven't shared it with anyone. So this is like the first sharing. So it's called, an ode to my eternal love. I feel you enter the room. I want to say, feel free to lick my pussy. Because I always wanted to die coming. And when you finally become my eternity, I want you to welcome me. But I am not ready for you, even though it is inevitable. I grab the leather of my wallet and open to school pictures of my daughters smiling against fake landscapes. This is my weakness, the compass by which I deceive myself, the purpose behind my blindness. It is the ace in your pocket, the fight by which I will claw you, push you, tear at you. When you come for me, take me first love, but not yet. I'm not strong enough to be there forever. I tell my daughters to burn my body, sprinkle the ashes and ceremony, though they know I want them to carry me to the mountain and leave my body for the crows to pick the flesh from my bones. I want to bow down before you and ask for more time with them, some kind of guarantee that I can see them to adulthood, let dinner around our maple table be absolute for them. I want this to be the centerpiece and anchor of their childhood, something for them to return to and one day bring their lovers to. I give thanks for each day, pretending to be blind to you. My skin still prickles when you enter the room. I'm forced to put words to it, pull out a stopwatch and try to memorize your pattern. Disease becomes a ruler by which I learn to measure your proximity, diagnosis, prognosis, attempts to predict your movement so that I can call the right people, arrive in the right place, say goodbye before you say hello. You swell around my heart already inside of me, constricting with longing. I love you too much to keep you out. Yes, you whisper, knowing you will take me from everyone I have ever loved. I exist as light and you are the only one I will ever commit to. Should I thank you that it's my mother you are coming for, that it is my grandmother you are cradling, or am I tempting fate? Entertaining the possibility of understanding you, a car nearly hits me as I cross the road, another swerves into my lane, I smile up at you. Yes, I could twist in metal under an airbag or at least too late. Any moment, you say? But we both know you are just teasing me. There is only one moment that will be ours. I step over a scorpion in the dark. We both know it's not time, but you send her and then her mate, a pair of scorpions in my bedroom, my soul bare against cold tile. Your sting is eternal, leaving tentacles of grief, invisible threads that bind me back to the material world. Lost becomes the bomb of legacy. I pull my daughters close to me, warm flesh against flesh. I want to whisper in their ears, this is the dance we must learn, but I don't want you to hear me. Do you wanna know when? Do you ask? I refuse to answer you, my love. When you come for me, don't take me in parts. Leave me my breasts, my intestines, most of my teeth. If I am hot enough, fit enough, well rested enough, can the player in me play you? Can I eat enough fruits and vegetables to keep you away? Not forever. Just for now, and now that becomes tomorrow and lets my daughters become women, you already know you possess me, every part of me. I wanna believe in something so I pray. I have learned your sent death, and when you finally come for me, you, my love, can lick me for eternity.