terrifyingly simple

predictable cloud cover falling over oil

slicking face expensive skin care routine.

i say, post pictures of it and rejoice

post pictures of what it could have been and

i say, rev

the metabolism with over 60 yoga poses to rev

the metabolism.

call your friend who is an artist and say "art is over now is the time for hurriedly writing and going from one thing to the next"

call your friend who is a writer and say "writing is over now is the time for live streaming reading the bank statements of the most powerful"

1. tell me i feel strong and then

2. place my arms lovingly above my head, posing me. oh no, oh no my arms

3. are above my head, all of me exposed

4. for the power to switch. cross hatching under the eyes.

some days ago we made a fire in the backyard, and instead of ceremony, instead of prayers or spaciousness or wandering ourselves through the unknown

we traded facts. videos. we speculated and as the fire kept eating cedar burning higher we built a bridge from us (hands on earth, feet planted, venus setting above us)

to another unknown world, one of 4 million deaths. and of course some of those would be people we know. of course they would.

we’ll remember this time when we built

a bridge to the idea of 4 million deaths and it was too much and i had to pour water on the fire and we had to all

go home.

i’ll remember it and the prayer says

I have to be ready

for when People’s Faces by Kate Tempest plays in a bar and my cells are washed with the liquid of

that fire

this time

The sound of birds like a carpet of flowers. Not like, it was. Stunningly beautiful, resplendent, almost too much. Also crystalline. It meant something about how I was or am supposed to direct my energy towards what matters. (what matters)? 

But in those novels, someone would have shown up either to help or harm. There would not have been so much loneliness.

Renee Gladman, Event Factory

There is something in the gift of life that exceeds the enclosures of logic, of science, of explanation, of analytics. And that -- that excess, is a gift

Ashon Crawley, The Lonely Letters

dedicating a dance to “Available” by Justin Bieber to the dance gods

in hopes they might find me to be

in fact

available

that is tell a story, interact with the so-called visible or phenomenal the despised daily, and explore the unconscious.

Alice Notley

thoughts transforming into particles dissolving into your tissues

There is no post or pre in this version of history that is not linear or teleological but rather moves in cycles without neglecting to return to the same point.

Silvia Rivero Cusiquanci

from october 2018

My brain works differently these days. I remember very little about the last four weeks, except swathes of time like thick plaster wiped along my mind’s eye, different shades of greyish for each general activity: 

on a bus. 

Looking out my window.

In bed. 

In the studio.

Reading. 

There is a lot of looking out my window, which is a greyish, greenish coloured swathe. 

I forget things quickly, and the surprise at how fast  the things I forget pile up is both ridiculous and terrifiying. My to do list (written in several different places) makes me cry when I look at it, days later, to realize I have been working off a new, different one, with different tasks, without having considered the things on this one. I become exhausted if I have to take more than one bus ride a day. 

Words evaporate in my throat on their way to my mouth. When I communicate in public, I watch the mouths of people on the other side of counters (coffeeshop, reception desk) fall from their corners, as time suspends between us, the word gone.

I continuously bump up against my ableist fantasies about what, how much, and how well I can do things. 

Make it like a puzzle 

In those first few days post-concussion, I managed somehow to read an entire novel. I think I believed I might eat my own arm off if I didn’t have something to do. The novel was about a woman who decided to try and spend as much as one year as possible asleep, with the assistance of enough pharmaceutical drugs to kill a horse. One of the main plot points was that she somehow didn’t die. I myself wonder: if I could put myself to sleep for a month, a week, even, could  Icome back to life with the brain I imagine I had? (I can’t remember what it felt like to have that brain, except that it wasn’t like this). 

This writing didn’t set out to be about how to make work after you get a concussion, but that is where I am, so that is what it might be. 

Tell a story -- true or untrue -- about a time you were appalled 

( i sleep like a teenager) 

(mornings used to be sacred for me, half an hour or an hour by the window with my coffee and notebook)

(If I wake up before 9:30 it is a miracle) 

(If I wake up before 9:30 I have an anxiety attack) 

On the 8th day of being concussed, I learn that there are two types of death: brain death and heart death. I learn this in a private waiting room in ICU at Vancouver General Hospital, where 5 of us have camped out for 2 days after someone in my family had a sudden, massive heart attack and stroke. 

I learn that he may have already died that morning, in one definition of the word.

In another, we as a family get to choose when he will die, by taking out the supports that keep his heart and lungs working. After the doctor and the social worker and the spiritual chaplain leave, we sit in this room with its conference table, its 2 days worth of fruit and crackers, pillows, blankets, camping mattresses, changes of clothes. In this greenroom between realms we talk about which kind of death carries the spirit with it. We lean towards the kind where we have a choice. 

Scatter something with your whole body secretly 

In the studio, Andrea and I talk about family. About grief and the unravelling of parents as the mirror image for the unravelling of ourselves. We talk about what we might have inherited, and wether it’s possible for our parents to inherit things from us: movement practices we share with them, little openings into how they might perceive their fast-aging bodies differently. 

My mother was never in a band 

When I began working on this piece as a solo for myself 

 (pre-concussion)

I was working on a ritual to shift time and space. To rearrange what I carry in my body so that it might not equal me so fully. So that I might encounter it on my own terms. So that I might call on witnessess for this encounter. 

Toss and Groove

And now I am asking those things I was working on to be a container for someone else’s carrying, and perhaps in the future many someone elses’. I wonder about the ethics of asking someone to describe a place in their body as a room, to enter it and to bump around in there with the risk of unearthing something surprising, perhaps menacing.I wonder about staying present so that each action feels vital. Not precious, but vital. I wonder about Andrea and I surprising ourselves. Ridiculous and terrifying. 

I will forget everything I’ve written here by tomorrow. 

Caving is the memory of entering a space and having it get smaller 

I wonder about how our bodies: carrying their electricity, weight, and time, imbue the things we touch and make. I wonder about working with things (material, objects, spaces) 

not props. 

(heart, brain)

When we made the decision to let him die, the nurse printed out his last heartbeat for us. It was  not a prop. 

Is dancing any way to ask these questions? 

shirt/that shirt has been in your arms/ and I have/ that shirt is how I feel 

When this person died it felt like the map I was lazily, indulgently drawing, with no risk or rush (with this ritual, with my conversations with him, in dream and over email) was taken away from me. I am the inheritor of what began before him. When he left I believed he took answers with him. Now, with my brain newly shaken in its container, with every re-remembering a surprise, I wonder about finding openings and moving towards them. I wonder about forgetting how it should be done (forward moving, always building, watertight). I think about making something for a “show” and the distance between this and there feels so great that it is almost a relief how impossible it feels. I cannot even imagine. 

Place your body in relation to the light sources in the room 

In the studio with Andrea, we talk about how fun it is to try and do something difficult, like break down an everyday action into a series of tiny repeatable movements. To tell a story without any attemp to charm or entertain. We talk about the inevitability that doing something in a theatre will make us feel fucked up about it. I love watching Andrea work out the puzzle of a task in her body, and I love the surprising ways her presence and dedication makes me laugh or well up. 

I find this in our notes: 

Nice thought: I promise not to wish that you were someone or something else. 

in a city with no end in sight i remember

certain types of plants need shadows and i'll say yes

i'll say

i am one of them.

my friend had to have

her baby in the hospital during a pandemic and what would it be like

to be born a bringer of light

in a city with no end

do you ever simultaneously wish someone would shut

the fuck up and also wish

they would hold you

today we listened to "Apocalypse" by Cigarettes After Sex and

I wanted to write to you to ask how you are little writhing and so many of us

out of mind. but every

thing is bolted down to every

thing so as not to be stolen by a stray

bad thought.

this is when we could really be our best selves and are we.

this is when we could really show up for one another and do we.

this is when we could say "this is what it was like" and will we.

i thought to go out back and move that taut yellow squirrel corpse

and when I did it it was shrivelled and dark. it happened

so fast in absence of heat or water and I thought to myself

o i know nothing

about death and what comes after.

o i know nothing

about how the body rots

in a city.

rereading what you wrote 6 months ago and trying to believe your own sincerity

the practice of continuously remembering that things are much older than us

port of everywhere pt 1

// travel // 

And so i set out to a cold port city in search of him. Knowing it would benefit me to be slippery, fluid, amongst bars and the night walks, i disguised myself as best i can as a man. A fur hat, a handsome shirt with stripes, a long blue coat. My fingernails shellacked with the deepest blue polish, and rings stacked up on my long fingers. You see, i knew that blue was the openest of all colours: a channel for possibility the way a sea is before it freezes in winter. in my finest blues and in the shape of myself, i set out to look for Antero, my grandmother’s portal to God. 

i change my location settings on my ok cupid profile and am astonished (a little disappointed?) at how many profiles are written in English. i coo over the names and drink my airport coffee: Annika, Sanna, Temu, Timo. i wonder what it might be like to mouth these syllables in bed. But for now, i feel small, and unready. Vetiver on my hands. 

// travel again // 

if the cow fits, slip it my grandmother said as a bird hit the window, announcing someone’s death in Helsinki. Things like this were always happening, birds bringing news in the snap of a neck, cows unwittingly becoming idioms, people standing up from the coffee, still hot, the moment before the phone rang, announcing someone’s death in Helsinki. The cows are a metaphor for patience, for arrival, for the timeline of god, of multiple stomachs. Don’t ask me if he was in the basement when it happened; the floor opened up and the bird had its details taken from it, silenced by that false passageway.

Antero was a giant who kept valuable spells and magics in his mouth. He slept under a pile of dirt, perhaps not a grave but the heaviness of soil a kind of comfort all the same. Not unlike the weight of organs, a lover laying against. in the dance i imagine, Antero arrives onstage 

(orange warm light ) 

( a long shining coat ) 

(bare chest )

(hair tucked behind ears)

in his hand is a bird. The bird is my grandmother, or it is god, depending on the crowd or the budget of the presenter. The music is cued by the performer onstage 

(Antero)

(portable PA with cording to sound booth). 

Antero begins with a slow liquid arm, the arm pouring up until it becomes water

(mop on stage left, pre-set for the performer). 

The song is Show Me Love by the singer songerwriter Robyn, no relation to the bird onstage. The solo continues through a score of loose bones, a soft and floating skull, sudden stillnesses, and choreographed winks on the “1” of every chorus. Sex is implied in most of the moments, but not all. The silken jacket which is more of a cape really, is removed to reveal an invisible gender. 

the bird hand opens 

the bird opens 

the room opens 

and 

(this is a lighting cue) 

god appears in the mouth of the bird, announcing important and valuable spells and knowledge. 

the work can be adapted for stage spaces, portals, the deep and cavernous 

space of the solar plexus, and 

galleries. 

a bird in the hand makes the crowd hungry for mythology. 

// isthmus, Karelia //

An isthmus is the parted mouth of land before the seal of war closes it, lips and all . Antero was born on an isthmus: the man, not the giant. And so everything he knew was narrow and subject to change at any moment. He learned to walk by placing one foot in front of the other like a tightrope walker, though the rope was his country and the danger on either side a rising sea, 0.2 cm every year. Antero could pivot at a moment’s notice: from forward to backwards, from past to present, from quiver to stardust. He knew that a perfectly timed shift (in rhythm, dimension, strongly-held opion) could drive a crowd or an encroaching Russian army wild. Antero understood choreography in this way. 

And so the swimming in language begins, head underwater to surface gasping at familiarity. Family in the bones and a tongue not nimble enough to follow its own blood. A blood dog, a blood pancake, a delicacy undertasted. The sky is clear and cool and he gets ready to arrive. He changes his location settings on ok cupid. He gets ready to drown in language. 

// learning // 

The two Finnish words he learned from his mother (Aiti) (other than that changing word, the first word) and the words for social order (Kiitos, Terve) were 

Kuunsiilta 

The bridge of light on the water that scorned lovers follow, 

Swimming towards the moon to die. 

And 

Tunneköyhä

Which translates to Emotions-poor, without the currency of language to describe what is filling up the heart. 

You could say there are categories of words. 

You could say one category of words is “useful” 

The other “poetic” 

But when Antero arrives in that cold port city it becomes clear that both of these categories are, in fact, useful. 

some signs at the climate march yesterday:

I dont really feel like dying rn

When I said I’d rather die than go to math class, that was a hyperbole, asshole

How Dare You (a teenager) and

How Dare We (their parent, walking beside)

dream record 1

I am in an apartment but it’s also a warehouse, a tall blank factory. I share it with 4 queer women, some of whom are dating and some of whom are breaking up and writing long poetic texts about it. Everyone is constantly in a state of getting ready; swishing in and out of our shared bathroom, changing clothes, listening to warm music. Outside the sugar factory windows a sharp drop into False Creek where, inexplicably, a pod of orcas have gathered to feed. Some of the queers, the most athletic ones, are down there, swimming and in canoes. The rest of us are worried about them, and about the intentions of both the whales and the queers. Up in the apartment, our attentions flutter between the window, folding our bodies out to see, and the hair curler that’s been left on in the bathroom.

soft light at the edge of your ribs

and a little shadow's mouth.

any room in any place blinks itself open

when you enter it: the gesture

of you so startling,

precise. i think

of your hand reaching out to touch:

glass, counter, frame, me. that

once broken finger continuously bowing, tip

to palm as if

to beckon

as if

to return you over and over

to yourself

R pondering the possibility of ghosts whose unfinished business on earth is unachieved orgasm. The potential of sex ghosts existing is simultaneously hilarious and devastating.

SF the other night over dinner: rest is not the same thing as recovery.

on the way home we listened to a lecture on supertime and now i can only live in the overlaps between one thing and another. everything else feels so harsh.

on transitions: “we know where we’re going but we don’t know how we’ll get there” - Stephanie Skura