Performance (II): 10.23.2009

photo: © 2009 Jason Riker, Riker Productions

photo: © 2009 Jason Riker, Riker Productions

This is playing dead in someone’s arms, spiraling on one’s knees.
This is a series of moves.  From every slat on the floor, arms outstretched clasp elbows.
This is how to mount one’s breastbone, static for a very long time.
Back to back with lean leg muscle, this is intertwining joints.
This is a series of poses called “balancing one’s calves atop abdominal muscles.”
And this is the extension of four arms.  This is two hands clasping.

*

Foot rest on thigh muscle.
Foot rest on back muscle.
Foot rest on black floor.

*

This is backwards into someone else’s hamstring.
Now, a solo performance. Dirty from the room’s black floor.
Now one arm behind the neck then motion.
Some distance by contracting muscles clean wide line.
Pressing one’s hand through the ceiling.
Pressing one’s hand through the breath-colored box.

*

Mime pressing hand through invisible box.
Mime trembling floor with string of pearls.
Mime in white slip extending string of pearls.
Mime choking itself.  Mime ties its wrists together.
Mime seduces left leg posing.
Mime pointed one foot tracing circles on black floor.
Mime beneath black curtain.
Mime flying extension with one wrist outstretched.

*

Dancing with dead face.
Dancing already dead.
Corpse in a music box.

*

Image of clean wide line extending toward ceiling.
Image pooling down from hair pooling down from cheekbone.
Image of two circular chapels, one clean wide line.
One clean wide line up ninety degrees.

About clairedonato

Claire Donato lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in the Boston Review, Black Warrior Review, Fou, and Harp & Altar. She is the author of a chapbook, Someone Else's Body (Cannibal Books 2009). Claire graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 2008 and is currently completing an MFA in Literary Arts at Brown University.
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