Kirsten Kaschock

CELLARDANCE

I made a dance about torture.  I choreographed it.

Yep.

A mirror in it for reading all the advertisements.  To see, an entrapment.

A body can be a tool for marketing, even past twenty-two, thirty-three even, because the body is unsatisfied.

Torture was in the dance I made represented by stuffed animals and a ball-peen hammer.

They can take it over and over.  I asked for volunteers anyway.  I taped out squares on the floor.

One volunteer I gave a panda.

Do you know about the memos? I asked them.

But I asked it with bodies which they had never been taught to read.  Not for nuance.

The soundtrack was bureaucratic.  Bybee.

Also, there are all these children kept in basements, sometimes by their fathers.  This was part of the dance.  I represented eighteen years without a window.  I had a mirror.

Time passed into. 

Theaters have no windows because of not wanting light.  Flickers of a thing unseen, but maybe paying more attention than in the sun, on the beach, all that flesh, advertisements flying over an ocean turning black since dawn.

I can’t really understand what dawn is anymore, beyond its relationship to my person.

My left hand, the eastern hand.

Kirsten Kaschock is the author of two books of poetry: A Beautiful Name for a Girl (Slope Editions) and Unfathoms (Ahsahta Press).  Her first novel, Sleight, was published by Coffee House Press.  She has earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia and is currently a doctoral fellow in dance at Temple University.