 My father's family fasts the slaughter to feast the arrival of his bride Ilocos Philippines So before my parents got married my father brought her to meet his family and they had a goat and of course they starved it For a day in order to butcher it What did she permit him to see my mother? The first time he brought her to the ocean the goat Hungry Muelling in the distance while my mother shrugged her shirt sleeve down her shoulder fragile in new day or Was it her wrist which implied at the unfreckling of her forearm? The susserous of flycatchers softened bleeds of starving a Hawk is circling closer What do we see when we see I can see my mother But never my father His shadow darkens her arm her breast Sinks to a curve we three know and there's enough time For hair to come loose the popping of a button a Rat reveals himself in the corner the way a woman tenses in and out of light and My mother is coming to that point of breathlessness Humidity speckling her birdwing clavicles and the goats hooves rustle above mud before harm the kiss Do you really think if you bend me I will love you you Crack my chin up Your hands brown pigeons scheming reunion at my cheek and temple Your jaw Cragged at the end of your thick neck of longing. I Claw on to you as the only tree here your swing I'm mad for gravity though. I'm bound diagonally to you Let me Push from your trunk towards the edge and my freedom Leave me to wither while moss weeps in the corners our halo liquid as yoke Waving from our bodies heat our divinity melting My dress blossoms loudly You are still wrestling me closer If only I could release to you my mouth just this Once and you would leave me But the shadows of your robe are so haphazard. I Know you will try to Smother me again The poppies scratch My feet reach beyond spring so Let's see. How do I put this so as the war is going on which we witnessed we Witnessed this terrible war from our side of the US border from our safety of the US border as that was going on We realize the importance of this thing called border and the borders that people create and in the In the book in my book the book in my book There's there's a character who's married to a drug addict while she's witnessing the wars that are because of drugs And so I'm gonna let you guess what is true and not true. My husband is here. He's not a drug addict I want to say this. He's also my second husband So I'm kidding. Okay, so my ex-husband Had this is based on a true story on the the children's father stabbed and beat 38 I'm gonna read the epigraph year old Janice Castorena threatened to kill them if they told and fled police said For two weeks the children visited friends made meals and kept to themselves while living in the home So Janice Castorena's husband Robert Castorena was my ex-husband's best friend And he used to send postcards from the asylum talking about how ungodly our marriage was because You know Catholics don't believe in divorce Right little ironic there a loaf of bread Jessica counts books Turns our picture frames over Folding the dead's flat teeth to wood She asks are they coming now? Jesus tells me to and though. I don't really know her I've worn her sadness in this house Her speckled shoulders soften below stained glass The nagging slant of a corner. I Don't confess How here an EMT once hunted my body for cuts My nakedness glowing from the mag light or all the strangers I've called at night asking questions to Jessica drags her own shore of voices She says she needs to kill Snacks her nails inside her hair and there are postcards which come From my husband's friend in asylum Which never talk of the past of his children in the house for two weeks a loaf of bread on the counter their mother butchered behind the bathroom door only cursive each shaky loop knotting toward the fringe of God Our chance roam throats of rooms and roses When she falls to sleep. I gather her silences crowding my couch and When she leaves I clean her menstrual stamp My two hands washed in blood There's so many things in this world for which people are dying for which we are complicit We are complicit as a country for what happened to Mexico and what is happening To Mexico still we are complicit for how so many people right now are dying And so I'm gonna read this poem called bodies and other natural disasters in a time of great natural disaster, right? Just a few things Let's see I'm gonna mention a film unfinished. Has anyone watched that on PBS. It's a wonderful wonderful thing a Wonderful documentary a film unfinished about a terrible subject and so a film and finished is about this real called dust ghetto that they found that the vermarked Decided to kind of film about The Jewish ghetto and they made up a lot of stories. It was just Nazi propaganda And so you'll see some scenes from the film unfinished in here where for example, they're practicing brisk or they're doing You know, they're they're they're doing a ritual bathing in ways that don't In ways that are meant to show their subject in an awful awful way, right propaganda. That's what it is It also mentions here peanut double Filipinos, you know what peanut double is I spent my whole life knowing about peanut double and then also It also mentioned the tsunami that happened some number of years ago Bodies and other natural disasters Six Jewish women are entering a bath Their breasts the only parts of their bodies fat enough to rise and the camera man had down remembers The old woman was chanting a prayer cut scene Now the men have been forced to bathe and for lack of breasts We can see the hooked ribs the canyon's stomachs each shank delicate as a cock a rolls and Their beards curling down like the hair spilling above their soft compliant penises Each scene has been well scripted bathing funerals circumcisions each practice of life in the ghetto commissioned for documentation and It would seem like a movie if only there weren't corpses being walked over That same group of people asked to cross the camera tiredly over the dead The point is for the people to look heartless Nevermind who laid the bodies down or who is directing the living behind the cameras eye They are faceless free of noise as the women and men walking now or washing and Weeping the ver mucked eat only in their wet eyes each time these unpractice actors look accidentally right into the lens It's night My dog has screwed his body into my husband's foot Here the untouchable blue of sifted light rises Like skin straining to a church's windows I am watching each fragment of film silently the captions black tags of context though The two-pound boy the cameraman calls him an actor Held quietly his skin marbled like a ham is context enough The quick neat blade Blood dark as chocolate after I Never learn if the boy lives though. I really should ask lives after what? Survive the circumcision suffer working the graves your uncle brother The girl who had crackers in her waistband whom you could have loved if only her jaw wasn't Symboling her teeth now her face in the skull barely visible Ashes still fall in the Philippines from peanut turbo Sinking to desks like dandruff We watched the powder drifting above us thought at last we were witnessing snow We were kids. What did we know? We only held our palms open crying for our mothers to look look In Miyagi the tide arches like the eyebrow of an angry woman Walls break people run and in the middle of this I imagine a girl Also bearing her expectant palms her lifeline Love line crevices seeking water. I have woken without the sun Only these fragments of film strobing to light the different edges of our room dog here Tail of a cat cresting like a wave before it drops with the rest of its body off the bed. I Cannot see the entirety of my husband's shape Only the rising and falling of his rest What passes above me? I cannot name and though I recognize it partly as grief Partly as thirst and in my soreness. I remember my mother stitched secret pockets to my pants She had coins notes pressed the paper and cold circles to my skin My mother Practiced safety taught me to fear each dark sedan pulling near the sidewalk So when my brother dropped with fever in Stanford, I laid his head on my lap Refused every neighbor who tried to lift him up Memories jolt us in the marrow of night like thirst Take care we say be aware and wary tug the latex tightly down the tip and in Chakra, I trace the impossible spires for how could such builders have taken care My mother walks the emptied rooms in the house of my puberty Dragging her fallen leg Her husband and children have left. It's just your dad works so much. She says Easter's Christmases Sundays and Saturdays She whispers to me the few times I call Pressing her cell to her mouth those lips which drip syllables to ease my bruises and the odor of Vicks waiting the dark My mother snuck from her husband's bed We call now to mix Stories of cooking and cats our throat soft to talk at all and when I travel out of country She knows not to listen for my ring The last time I saw her I was taking her home to bury her brother Our women wailed like the ocean that we never saw the water beyond the plane Bodies stack upon bodies the tide withdraws its claim She says The Wall Street Journal says the drugwars crossed over Don't you know Minama Halperin Kita and I keep my borderland from her say nothing of our yielding necks She must see the mounting dead here like a movie as I screen now these fragments The fingers shocked their whorls the slow collection of teeth She turns the gas knob off 12 times Then each light switch a mother's dozen She has learned to take care so carefully her eye twitches with each winding danger and There should be danger for all we've done Cut back to the women bathing the old woman's lips to bees Their breasts still beautiful are Sickled as waning moons and the grays of their bodies shift as they sink deeper their skin in The middle of night and rising water all we have is prayer Miss I'm a really happy person in real life Oh Anyway, okay So this book, thank you so much for coming out tonight This book is called for want of water and other poems and I want to read the title poem Which looks like this I had fun with the tab button and my publisher had a hard time with it She's like, oh, how are we gonna do that Sasha? but It's about immigration and we know that in this country our stories of immigration are not monolithic But this is based on a true story and his name is Julio Hernandez he he was trying to cross the border where I live that a busso waters border and His mom died on the way and he had to drag her body across the desert When he made it over the border a lot of people made phone calls But they didn't make phone calls to help him they made phone calls to immigration for want of water and Ant will drown himself His body is submerging into ease His mandibles head and ten a baptized How lovely to lose your senses to the cup of your want a Boy Drags his mother's body across the desert her fluids rising to heaven in order to quench her skin How divine her body must have looked Clutched at the ankles her arms reaching out in exaltation Her head stippled in rings of sand and blood as he walked with her slowly Her fallen and moving shaped the fork of a divining rod Her body shaking with each of his steps and for water Shaking to find that deep and secret tributary I have dreams of letting go of water of Waking my lover to a bed of my urine as my brother did to me his thin limbs shaking to discover the shame of his inside self and What did we know that to have an inside what enough to free was luxury? the boy Walks with his mother He is only 13 The age I learned to stroke on the toilet the blood off my fingers and he cannot cry Because the cry would mean the waste of his own Wetness to cry would mean to stop to think to differentiate the liquids moving down his face to cry would mean to cry So he goes on and This is a common story The boy is not a boy now, but every boy we have ever known People find him they help him to lift his mother onto their hands their necks They lift her to their own dark and desperate dryness and they make it Yes, when they make it over the border to a mall parking lot They lay her down. They fall with her body as a clump of bodies behind a city Dumpster and people make holes from behind windows not to the immigrants with the dying core But to the police who come with their handcuffs and call her dead No to call would be to give her life a name Roundness to where there are now only angles To call would be to remember all the other times that he has called for her and the boy plugs his ears Shakes his head doesn't know that he cannot physically produce tears anymore Such thirst can rid us of these symbols Only that now there are mouths around him calling other names as men run and other men give chase Because how much do you need to give up in order to stay a boy a mother your land and inner land? Nothing Nothing can be given and he will remember Nothing as he sits in a cell waiting for his sister to come to release him from his cellular pain He will only remember water that want for the clouds to let go their rain and how seeing them dropping He kept pulling forward their bodies steady towards that dark uneven line last poem We draw lines so firmly now So two days ago was it two days ago that Richard Wilbur died two days Richard Wilbur? I love this poet Richard Wilbur. He has this poem called love calls us to the things of the world of this world and and He there's this one scene where everything everything is dark and undifferentiated and it's my favorite time to look at the border I have this office that looks over El Paso and Juarez and You realize borders is construction. It's artificial We've we've we've decided to build walls to push towards that artificiality But the land the Chihuahua Desert actually goes from above El Paso to down south into Chihuahua Like the land itself is the same we've only decided to divide it into nations And so one of my favorite times is to get up and write in the early morning when it's still pre-dawn and everything is dark And you can't differentiate one city from another and it's all the same city coming to light And so I really love like those moments before lights are after light because our borders our lines aren't drawn so firmly This is a love poem see I write love poems to you guys Anyway, this is a love poem to my husband and I dedicate this to you, baby Gotcha, uh, it's called touched by dusk. We know better ourselves You map my cheeks in gelatinous dark Your torso floating a forgotten moon and a violin Crosses the sheets while you kiss me your mouth of castanets. I believed once my uncles lived in trees For the encyclopedia I'd carried to my father the Philippines They long got hunting from a branch My father's chin in shadows. I Try to tell you about distance though my body on stitches Fruit of your shoulder lit by the patio lamp Grass of you sticky with dew and all our Unlit places folding one into another By dead night my face in the pillow Your knuckles in my hair my father whipping my back How to lift pain from desire The word safety from safe mean and the wind Chatters down gutters Rumoring rain. I Graze your stubble lose my edges mouthing your name To love what we can no longer distinguish We paddle the others darkness Whisper the bed Cry the dying violet hour You twist your hands of hard birches and we peel into our shadows The losing of our names Thank you so much. Thank you