 Brent was born in the small town of Warsaw, New York and studied at Bard College and the University of Michigan Where he received an Avery Hopwood award in poetry Please welcome Brent So I'm gonna be reading from this is my new book The Ghost in Us was multiplying. It was just published last month by Noemi Press You can buy it if you would like to or you can just peruse Okay This is the first poem in the book. It's called This Is What I Have Been Made For The body keeps asking the body to become a zero or a sum This is the lesson of intimacy. This is the lesson of less than me It begins in a quietness Sometimes far a cup on the shelf reveals my body to be sand too late to fire it in the kiln Impossible to drink from I fill it up with water Where did I go says the boy who has never been a boy a hole in the wood becomes a church Like scaffolding the mountain I cannot climb the cup I cannot drink from and this Somehow relieves me. I cling to my beliefs Nothing makes it not a mountain. I know a frayed is so like scaffolding I know the hole in me is where a steeple would be I Can sleep here after the last of the cinders cool a ladder leans against a ladder Longingly but shall not shall not climb on thee This is what I have been made for for to walk across a ruthless me made of breath and not of wood When it tumbles less than sky is God's ambivalence Can everyone hear okay, okay This is called sorry, this is called casual sex San Francisco take that Facebook okay, um I Am I did actually tell my amazing boyfriend that maybe we should go and sling eggs at Mark Zuckerberg's house Zuckerberg's house while we're up here. So that might be occurring Um casual sex that which has nothing to do with eggs or Mark Zuckerberg, but maybe it does Casual sex I have to say it a million times You're not to whom it may concern But whom could make an opening in him like the smoke in this language I intrude upon while he blubbering of heart was all too tucked inside the minus sign. I struck around my neck How much longer could I hold my head up to look at him the blackout in me jingling him of dog leash of muzzle Climbing in reverse like a thief through my cartoon window. I Found him like I find everything on my way home from the euphemism on the wrong side of town The mouth inside of brick where night can go on being night until it finally passes out inside some other animals ambition That's where I buried the clocks in case you're wondering the coils inside them stammered Meanwhile the nightingales go at it Declaming their anthem from my face as I wipe it clean of every him inside of him inside that ooble yet It isn't hard to fall inside of falling my him inside of him makes me you a double Preposition a corridor in briefly the mind outside the mind in me sky math How like a window the mountain shakes you Substitute you for heat and the other handholds granite breath noise Fear the bulbous parts of the roots you climb a rock-shaped quietness empties the bowl What's audible from all that twitches above tree line this empty page of sky is made of you of Sound but exceeds it How could it be that you find yourself looking down to where the ones who came before you who held their breath and bathed you Got stuck and stayed there How could it be that you can't just pull them up with you those trees scooped still Bleached into bone bleached into one noun as big as all of it Elsewhere without going this anywhere abiding here this half-inflated wind less than orange the sun rescued hew of it this orphan There are no bodies on the chairs now But they aloft at the chairs talk to each other when stirred like you do Pushing their complaint through keyhole behind which the snow the open mouth of snow The nothing song of it as if it could be history the grasses combed flat under new antennae their sharp green Perfections it melts now daily the monastery door What cloud made its bed here? What ladder? what poem climbing down And this is called this is a prose poem. It's called the properties of nectar When I woke up in the stranger's apartment, there was a slow-moving wasp on his pillow He was washing his face in the bathroom The night before I did the same He told me he was embarrassed by the mess. I told him I was an archaeologist I remember Tom of Finland and the faucet crusted with the lime How early is loneliness the upside-down arrow shaped like bird claw if I had only stayed there Looking in his mirror while he slept in the other room. I might have never lost my face a Boulder in the meadow sever shapelessness from shapelessness the butter on my lips too continuous with petals as He filled the sink. I carried the pillow to the window and crushed the wasp against the glass His mustache was just a little longer than the rest of his facial hair, and I realized this must have taken some effort The properties of nectar are determined by means of tracing its limits Before I left his apartment. I put the pillowcase in my coat pocket He didn't call so I cut it into squares Slowly I sewed the whole thing back together. I Used to go to a bar on 8th Street the hole in the wall That was before everything started to happen on the internet a little flag waits for some hawk to light to recognize its own Body as a branch as a system of diverging There were stickers on the wall from queer nation, and I wondered if the men who stuck them there were still alive That was before cell phones and the men I would meet wrote their telephone numbers on scraps of paper None of the pants I wore back then had pockets, so I just swallowed the numbers. They gave me To guide into the mouth to light upon the arrows their white wings opening I never knew the color or trajectory Sometimes they got caught and cut the lining of my throat Even now if a man approaches me to ask my name. I'm afraid all those numbers will start to bleed. I Try not to speak in public Especially in places that should be private like the locker room in the artificial light a stranger removes his clothes The hidden throat of masculinity as with a bell the bucket spills The darkness of a lion summons clarity the certainty of shirtlessness The distance between us increases with his nakedness, and I know I should not feel this way Behind his body is the pool where my want gives way to foam What circle inside the mind carves out muscle my lack his body's shadow His penis painted slowly a hydrant in reverse and upside down emergency The color is an afterthought. I make it smudge inside me. I make it all stop moving I don't say a word, but I know that the name for the hole. I have made is a light And then just two more. Is that okay? Um, oh, I just turned something on. Hopefully that's okay So, um This is about drones It's called the flight cage After so many years of abbreviated sky the new bird is cast from the bars of its former cage What's left of the aviary is the no longer boy a soldier unable to exit a door. He never entered He drops off the kids puffs out his little adopted cloud into Nevada Some of it stays inside him the hugely never of Nevada The lattice between the species begins to curve it coats his lungs He begins his tour of duty flicks on the computer the only window in the operation room eye of the new bird Which has no eye? He sleeps with his own half open Holding the bird with his invisible string as if the war were not unkind The casualties What is a casualty if not swallowed by its facelessness the digital idea of death? Comes flapping across the water The blood can be viewed from a satellite the way that morning spills Immediately through the minus sign through the semblance of a bull Um Now I'm gonna read what I kind of feel like is the most painful poem in the book and I thought about following it up with something Softer, but I think actually just given our current state our current You know where where we're at I Wanted to just have its own space So I this is a poem for Kenneth Wade Harding Was shot here in San Francisco by the police For not paying his bus fare in 2011 It's called the frequencies Sometimes I think I'm a tree the utility pole that history made of that yellow pine shipped west from the mills of Mississippi sheathed entirely in staples Run your fingers up and down my little goalposts those almost squares that cover me Anomaly as true as foliage My stuck-in halos through which I was last seen at the yard sale on the corner of the concert on Thursday or the rally On Sunday for the eighth anniversary of the war or for the boy who was shot in the back when he tried to run away from the police He was alive and he didn't pay his fare and he ran and he was only 19 and no the police say there is no say Entirely he was running before he even got on the bus ten times in the back ten times running entirely in the late 15th century the word for victim fell into someone's mouth and He had and has and they a name the police say their guns can't fire a shot like the one that no They say it was he it was the boy who know there is no Unpunctured anyone what I mean is history. There is no completely stapled to the pine No sentence whose edges have not been no Entire despite the desire for grief to a commonplace a victim a solitary not them whose feather whose Etymology has not been disintegrating Time is always getting rained on and peeling a who outlived by the tooth that put it there a Name fell into no What does it matter the size of the caliber after ten times kills anything remotely resembling a hymn or a them a Who caliber the internal diameter of a name fell into someone's mouth Gone ten times gone the weight of all those wires above and the voices stuck inside them And when are they going to fall? Thanks