Poetry, Dancing, Direction, Co-Editing by me

Performed in CLI Studios Easthampton, MA December 2021

Asynchronous Spring

Thank you to my big fat brain for withstanding the dissonance—

we have new songs to learn.

I wanted to submit to something but was gripped by myself.

My poems like a CPR heartbeat,

every word like a Hail Mary said backwards and thrown up in vain, I open my mouth it fills with

rain, my cells will adapt.

I’m like a squirrel!

I’m looking for the nuts that I hid winters ago.

Some are stale and some are stolen, some have cracked with the cold-

but

God, so much of me is right where I left it;

atrophied, pale, untouched by my sun,

I eclipsed out of love and this pain and this hurt and this anger—

comes quickly. Leaves quickly. Leaves me gasping, wanting more and

I want to be broken and re set in my own stone.

The marquis of my life turns on bulb by bulb, and

I’ve known it all along, didn’t need to be told.

But that hug that you gave me, the high five from that old man, the blame that you spared me all the equations we drew in the sand…Thank God Thank God for all of my disciples, no God no God that my parables aren’t infinite, I have chapters torn out,

some of my shoes are made of their skin, some of the people I killed, some of the places I lied about having been.

There is blood on my brow and grit in my bones but I touch it, and smell spring.

I touch it now and I know that I was made to wither that time

I alone enchant the excalibur sword,

I am better than everyone I am headless gross toad, I am a redwood, I am a little girl .

Didn’t I carry this chest all through the storm?

no one knew what it held, I was so often warned.

but

Someone inside me is stubborn and smart.

Someone inside me is serious and climbs ladders

rung

by

rung.

(I’m smiling)

And you know what the scary part is?

I don’t think there are flowers inside.

They had no sun, no water to grow.

I’ve got a body. A brain. A heart…. (A smile) Of gold.

Valuable, malleable. Can’t grow. (smile grows from here to the end of the poem)

But it’s not some diamond from coal. It’s a goddamn natural element oh my god, look how much I know

I’m a goddamn natural element,

There’s so much I don’t know.