Friends, thanks very much for listening to Poetry and Bound. The Poetry and Bound book is out in loads of places around the world and it's almost out in the US on December the 6th that will be launched in the US.

And they'll make a great holiday gift if you want to buy one or more than one. You can pre-order a copy of the book at Poetry and Bound.org.

And if you're listening before the launch date, you can join us for an online launch in the evening of December the 6th. It's all free and you can register for that too at poetryunbound.org.

I look forward to meeting you on the page or meeting you at the launch.

My name is Podrigotuma and one of the things that in live-ins and challenges me about certain forms of art is that they're not just saying, look at me. It's not just an artist saying, look at this event.

But somehow the art is looking back at you so the gaze of the viewer is also being scrutinized and that might mean that you suddenly have to realize this person isn't a pawn in my story.

This person is a person in and of themselves. Their universe is as important to them as my universe is to me and in fact their universe might convert or change or challenge my understanding of the universe.

Small talk or in my hand, galaxies by Benhamin Nakahasebe Kingsley.

It looks like the thief rocketed their whole self through the bullseye of my driver's side door and you're not wrong to expect the old joke about there being nothing in my car worth the thieving.

Or maybe I've caught you eye-rolling please God, not another poem about windows.

But I crossed my fingers, hoped to die, sock on diesel and be hog-tight, I'll avoid semile for the eye and soul. And I'll be careful as the fixer's hands, who came to pry, water-logged lining from my inner door,

her small boots crunching sun and the glittered puddle of fractured glass, I think how I didn't think to sweep. But even so, she is still kind, I think to get her a glass of tap water now, but then think of all the stairs.

She says, this big soul reminds her of Cuba, it too, she asks, but I don't relish speaking Spanish anymore.

I tell her no, I have always lived here in Miami, I lie, but offer my father it was a Mason, and Bueno too at that. I've given her this one fractal truth as if it could be understood, not to mistake my soft handshake for ignorance of all the working classes.

But she is not thinking of me, only the door's motor grinding, she asks, but what do I do? I hope she will ask if maybe I am Mason myself, but no, I say I am maybe a writer.

Me too, she beams, and offers a full palm of what she'd vacuum from the doorframe, shattered glass beads of blue refraction, wonder, she says, wonder at all they have seen.

She insists there toward the tiny eyelids in me mano galaxia, she says, and I wonder how often I have mistaken myself for the seer, for the seer, and others simply as the scene.

So this brilliant poem by Ben Hemi and Nakahasebe Kingsley has a magnificent tone of casual conversation to it. His car has been broken into, or at least the window has been broken.

It looks like the thief rocketed their whole self through the bullseye of my driver's side door. Even the description of that, it makes you think, this is someone who's looking at, how do they do that, rather than, oh my god, my poor car.

And then, immediately, he addresses us, the readers, or the heirs of the poem, and you're not wrong to expect the old joke, you know, about there's nothing in the car worth stealing. And then he's addressing a kind of a poetry anxiety, don't worry, don't worry, I'm not going to make this into some big symbol, about windows being a stand in for the eye or the soul.

And there is a gathering into a conversation, but underneath that gathering into the conversation, what we're hearing is a certain self-consciousness to, and a certain way within which the speaker of this poem has a certain kind of self-involved anxiety.

And I don't mean self-involved in a negative sense, I mean that they're involved in their own world where he's thinking, oh, are you going to think that I'm not working class just because I'm a writer, are you going to think that just because I start off a poem by a reference to a broken window that I'm automatically going to mean the soul and the eye, are you going to think this, are you going to think that?

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