Hello, my name is Ocean Vuong.

I'm a poet, and today  I'm happy to be reading "Tours" by C. D.

Wright. This poem is this a short, almost surreal moment of, you know, a young person coming to terms and reckoning with the inheritance of their family, particularly a mother and a father. And it's a poem that is so so dear to me, I hang it in my bathroom wall.

Because it's just this short kind of emblem into someone deciding where they're headed and where they're from and where they're going. Um, and it's a poem that's incredibly dear to me. And I hope if you're coming  to it for the first time,  it's dear to you as well.

A girl on the stairs listens to her father beat up her mother. Doors bang. She comes down in her nightgown.

The piano stands there in the dark like a boy with an orchid. She plays what she can then she turns the lamp on. Her mother's music is spread out on the floor like brochures.

She hears her father running through the leaves. The last black key she presses stays down, makes no sound, someone putting their tongue where their tooth had been.