PERFORMANCE STUDIES
When you don’t have the words / what will you use to speak (to truth)? Whiteness is structured like a language / we speak it / without knowing so > today I appreciate the fact that I lack nothing / tomorrow: the tone of your voice— “you better watch it.” Discúlpame. There are other ways to communicate > your desires / your femininity : my attempt at passing – a doing though it undoes me; the movies teach us how not to be us } people in general / do not teach one another /to embrace the undisciplined object of study > the unschooled part of you > the coyote in the garden : just an excuse / to be reckless with yourself (rather than reckless with someone else )>> when I grow up I’m going to give you what I never got: an education } I learned early on / how to write on command rather than to talk too much > about death >> ancient civilization / our problems / the pyramids / we “pass” / the shards / what once was language > I was not born / an actress, but I will die one / I guarantee you / the memories that house this house are ours / and this was the ransacking before the riot > the end of the world / inaugurates the soul on clearance. EVERYTHING MUST GO. >> I self-/ modulate so much I don’t / hear when the bitter comes out: you do / give me back to myself – by giving me the look / we self-modulate because now we are two : the one inside and the other / looking back at you > under the skin / the charred woman > I use her | to distract you / and you call it heterosexuality, the coin I know / not the pony I own
Lara Mimosa Montes is the author of The Somnambulist (Horse Less Press, 2016). Her poems and essays have appeared in Boston Review, Fence, Poor Claudia, The Third Rail, RECAPS, and elsewhere. She works as a contributing editor for Triple Canopy. She was born in the Bronx.
From personal ads compiled as narrative to a frame-by-frame retelling of a short film on grazing sheep, Nao’s poems and stories are acrobatic experiments in form.
“I don’t want the kind of career where everything is sensible and safe; I’d rather suffer through the anxiety of wondering where I’m going next than suffer the boredom of dancing in the same safe square.”
“I don’t think being a cynical, academically oriented deconstructor should stop one from being a wild and crazy performer.”
Work that is just about the technical or conceptual, personal or political, is fine; it meets the world with what’s in fashion. But there’s something else bordering on magic, that brings an artwork home, makes it land and resonate. You can’t really teach that so much as conjure it.
Kara Walker
