there's nowhere between the merely savage and the merely sentimental so nowhere snaps into a local
dissatisfied and free
zone. Choreographing a solo for mulatto dancer about the whites only mourners bench Billie Holiday describes seeing in her childhood church. The dancer is forever/half there, haunting each lament with the math in her movements and considered movements. Running toward the bench, then backing away, then leaping, then scooting away on her ass, as if from some predator, then tiptoeing up to ask permission to join again, then sitting, then crying, then running away, then turning back to ask for forgiveness, then nevermind, then turning back to say nevermind, then being asked to join, then the mourners can't mourn without the math in her movements and considered movements. Then she no longer cares. Then she hides from them. Then she builds a new church, a blacks only mourners bench. That doesn't work either. Impossibility is a destiny and she reaches its needles and spins on them like they mention gardens from where she's been left out of the myth and written new ones in a two-way language. The roosters catch on and jiggle their coos something urgent and tender as she sidles between them like movie shot in manhattan stoop feet dawn from now on, dissatisfied and free
