 I'm going to tell you something reasonably private right now. I am a math geek. This is called encumbered. And it's about quantum mechanics. Our eyes listen across and through the spin of dead stars, birthing stars, reach across and through the decades. We pulled matter apart. And those of us who pay attention moaned with the universe, all in the same note. Encumbered, non-local, call to now the song of origin to level cities, to demonstrate demons. Reach through, moan with the universe, a sound that has never abated, a sound that echoes down the connections, seizes our muscles, frozen in sound, in action, encumbered, Nagasaki. And today's the anniversary. So there's that. So I'm reading this still. When you write a political poem, you hope you don't have to keep reading it. I still have pieces that work perfectly well that I wrote during the Levy Breaks in New Orleans. And this is unfortunately something we're still working on. It's not that. But I think you'll get it by the sixth section. It's called parent and child cycle. One, when the first pain hit, I went up on my toes. Birth dances you. And all of the people that will breathe at you and count for you speaking just for myself, they were of precisely no use. My son and I, we did that dance together, became two people. It's another kind of storytelling. Two, we took the stereotypes in our hands and tore them up. The worlds we've created between us, parent, child, person, person, you curled there and whispered stories of healing into my fever dreams. We have adventured. Three, cleaning grandpa's desk, we found the Mary of Shestahova, her black skin rendered in silver metal, Isis by any other name. She still brought her lover back from the dead and claimed a son from him. Isis of sky and wisdom, wrapped in blue as I have been, listening and just feeling the heartbeat, the damp skin, the wonder of a new human. Four, we carefully mark the places where the world changes. Pack our borders, our toothbrushes, our walking shoes. We are rewritten in every watershed, every story shed, children of corn walking north. The sons of corn enacted the magic as they were taught and the people were fed. We are dusted with pollen. We are walking north. Five, the child shows me the mark of the scorpion on his leg and I show him the mark of the spider on mine. We have walked dangerous miles. He and I separate parts of the same story. The gods took a handful of cornflower and blood and we are born. We are danced. We go up on our toes. You may have been born differently, but this is our story. Six, children in cages. Disprayer. And genetic memory offers me panic. Stolen children, the sacred geometry shattered. We carry our borders. We who are blood and corn. We reach across the rivers. We call to our cousins. We burn the copal. Seven, this part of the poem isn't written yet because we're going to have to write it together. I know that one's hard to applaud. I get it. I feel the same way. I totally feel the same way. The Indian wars are not over yet. Persistent misunderstandings, analgesic can't lift the vice of being an illusion that one grandma could leave the tracks of any other animal. Her long skirts trailed and then side-wander spirals instead of Homo sapiens prints or maybe the offset big toe of close cousins. Her dance was to look like something else. Fish turbulence in Spring River. We are spoken of as ghosts, but I can't catch the trick of being a spirit. The group of old men, one with a rifle broken over his arm, renegade still. And I can promise you the Indian wars are not over yet. I can't make you too many promises, but I will stand on that one. And I think I'm going to finish with this. It's called Sunset at the Pacific. Out here, we are made of cyclone fence and boxes where we store folded sunsets. They could break your will. The dance of being hauled away for sitting, for not taking the invitation to leave, not for now. And the ritual movements will make you keen old songs that you should know. We'll drag from your tongue the language of the gods of pavement and acquisition. The doors and windows in this place don't open. We don't remember how to build them that way. And the ships come and go to a different schedule. Thank you so much for being here. And can we have more applause for our three fabulous readers? Jenny Davis, MK Chavez, Cassandra Dallet, you guys, the library, the AV people, John Smalley, all of you, thank you for making this all possible. Cassandra has books.