Performed by Val Cole

POEM:

They look like an accidental bird,
Wings making grey angles
Their thoughts move in rings around their ears
And scrape against the sharp jaw lines,
Movement horizontally, body stretching across
only to snap back
into embodiedness.
Seeing them, I noticed how
our spines crack open at dawn
And spill the marrow of our identity.
Bodies look the same under blankets
until the nocturnal seizures of sunlight pierce through,
blending the two states until they are a bent time of day,
And suddenly we can see it all:
They have a tempered jaw
with a voice that belongs on trees at sunrise.
The earth has these masculine hips
and trees that penetrate the air
Shaking off colored leaves and the traces of white frost
Like a drag queen taking off her makeup.
The trees bury old roots like tucked testicles,
Makeup cracks caked on
And they live for a long time,
Performing the boundaries between solidity and color.

And my accidental bird
They told me they lie on a bed and pray every night
For hair to grow across their body like moss
I told them you are a soluble thing
You are not a discrete moment
You cloud the line between this human thing
and the soil on our soles
Bending everything out of their shapes
and old occurrences
So comes your body-moss around the bend.