Articulations of Performance
by Noa Emi
Of late: I can be found wandering around ruins and rubble / feeling the arithmetic of dysthymia in the soil / the sweat of bodies and pulsing hearts / where the sparrows sing I am home in not being home / the corners of the grave speak from a shadowed obscuredness / the matrix codes our perceptions, but we all keep looking looking looking / runnin’ up the mountain to find [ ] / I want my eroticism back, to feel sweet sugar cum trickling down my trachea / the gender is fucky today, all days, everyday / my flesh aching for a strangeness of slurred obfuscation / the haunting of souls ain’t gonna let me forget the things I haven’t seen / I want to die in the past and fuck up the now / where does all this go when we get drunk, get down, and get disordered / is there love on the surface or only in the underworld / raw tunnel knives caress my soft callused skin / my blood on the fabric of my clothes, but crumbling meanings was worth it / my life is my death and my death is my life, so what’s the difference…
Of early: A person knows nothing about the workings of another / there are two many frontiers walls, borders wounds, barbed thorny wires crisscrossing the mileage of our thought / hornets flit around my eyes and take rest of my lashes / hearing rumbles from the somewhere that is here but not here / spiders crawling under my epidermis / glimpses in the mirror speak volumes to my insanity cause we all hallucinate / a person says the world is mattered, yeah sure, if so I don’t want the world / new ink carved into my memoriam skin / was I raped or was I made sickly slimy love to / a person graffitis their name unto a dreaded stone barricade and names their history / if Death is to find me, let it be in thundering storm / here I am, so here you see / me myself and I, confined to your demarcated violations / against better judgement I stop judging start terrorizing / souls are clouds of ragged silent wrath and bodies are just clouds of venom gas…
Of morrow: The sting of fruit graces my warm mouth / there are crashing waves of holistic ruckus / some small part of my being longs for the day when the anesthesia of age helps me fade to black / some coarse denim grates like sand and pangs of anger jolt through my sensibilities / among ashes, scarred flesh hold wounds / strolling here in detritus, primordial magma stirs, wakened and lumbering / I thought I was part of the public all those revolutionaries keep talking about / might a life be cultivated in the essence of an unhurried heartbeat / my clit is hungry for groping hands, even wrought iron bones shake and quiver under orgasm / I want my inverse body, tears glistening down my cheeks, to sing the chorus of cacophonic melody / shelter in place is their order and I want no part of it / the world is immaterial and so am I so where does this World come from if not from traumatic vibrational tones echoing and clattering against the cavern of singularity / the wind graces me with its vague elegance / to me the mirage is beautiful / furtive conspiratorial whispers / I can feel the earth sigh…
Of present: I don’t want a body no more, too clunky, hefty, weighed to this ground / ain’t gonna drown in these godforsaken currents / if one closes the shades of their windows to the soul, they might hear the ancient timbre of oaken friends / more of us dead today, saying their names would take days without slumber / shallow crescent moons waxing and waning against the helix of sunbeams / straining inwards passerby glare cause you’re outta place on these damn streets / sometimes my angry lesbian cat lady side comes out and sometimes my transfag bitchiness gets the better of me / we’ve all kept policing these identitarian delineations for no reason but the reasoning of the World’s commandments / a moth is just a cursed butterfly, and I want to live with the moths next to the sacredness of their blighted being / some cozy up and cuddle while the sky shrieks with avengeance…
Of never: I guess if you need to find me you gotta be willing to bear some burden, get naked in your solitude, and chant the song of your esse / I feel alwayshere and neverwhere, like the ravens perched on my shoulders / discordant ontological satisfaction in the anaphylactic robbery / I wonder if all those treacherous apples tasted good and where I might find the orchard in which they were picked / I like scratching folklore into the records / antearchaeology means unearthing, unworlding, un-ed-ing / we out here speaking parables of maddened sensuality and they just look through the fissures at our lascivious cataclysm / something werqing in the nearby stereo / I don’t want any sort of sanative unemotive pledge but some purely tainted chaos—that’s my dialect write there / postcards sent from nowhere end somewhere / candied roasted walnut bitter my taste and power the motion to huck the grenade-that-is-me into the stratifications of the Normal / visibility means dilution, dilution means someThing torturous is on its way to steady our unsteadiness / what does a person do when a noThing speaks softly from the void of one’s own cherished yearning…
Of always: There might always be unassailable hegemony, there might always be connective tissue cemented past the fluency of flesh / some cartography this is, but I am an unthought flicker of exist(ants)(ence) / paragraphs dam(n) the wild river of my conscious spillovering / paranoia shivers up my spine and digs its fangs into my cerebrum / sometimes I listen to my books converse through their covers, anti-wor(l)ds exchanged in the deadened night / lofting with smoke, the bar smells like sweat and dirt and human bodies thriving / crawling out of my vulva is a dæmon sustained by menthol cough drops and paper blood / where red (s)wells under my exterior I hear birds chirping to another / my neck adorned with a torc of black-and-blue for the ever / in this cold bright world I cling to shards of warmth / reflexive glass shatters on my skull cause I said I wanted to be freer than free / why people so ready to defend murder / sometimes scribbles on a page are gateway drugs for anarchy / if I exist it’s in the controversial interstices ruminating under sociality…
Of moments: We are monstrosity, becoming ever beloved by chaosmics / stopping to smell the roses’ jealous perfume / the murmurations of plants, vines cascading down my back / latex bodysuits are only resistive on the body of a dominatrix / kindness left us for underground heresy / when streams trickle over rock, the dead speaking to us in tongues we are not privy to / sometimes all one needs is the scent of fresh baked rosemary olive bread / I strive to undoubt my corpus when all of ‘em shout that I don’t care, when they’ve been so silent about slaughter / at least in hell we all dance in devilry with pain on our arms / seconds, hours, flitting by silently / my flesh moves of its own accord, exceeding the confines of my body / where there are serrated knives there are torn and bloodied beasts, hunted and slain / I worry the evening brings the collapse of falling stars that will only shimmer on the barren ground / abandoned houses and desiccated insane asylums yawn out their mo(u)rning songs / cracked wine barrels leaking crimson into the hold of a ship / effervescent simmering virgin coconut oil bubbling in the frying pan / black coffee tastes lovely on sundae / I am sewing up my sinew, infection underneath / being suffocated by a plastic bag while getting fucked is better than hanging from a noose…
Of intangibility: Vibrant kaleidoscopic vengeance / a maelstrom of tacky bureaucratic postage makes a wonderful firestarter / dry thunder and fae creature orgies / assigned-cunt-at-birth bitches strutting the runway / some men jeer but all I hear is gagging / thorn collars etched onto our visage / bebe blankets singed in the white tar armageddon / silence speaks in deafening psychic tones / thrumming along the digital cobweb volumizes cordial trenches of sorrow / poisoned bread induces unflinching rage cause y’all are so damn hypocritical / outlaw, out of law / wolven howls during nights with no moon / writhing roiling cyclonic spirituality / my body is akin to agony and I’ll wait for my Death’s tender kiss…
Thank you to Enver Wong for their insightful interpretations and beautiful friendship; to Jasmine Elizabeth Smith for offering me their formative poetic wisdom; and to Fred Moten, whose work bears influence on me from afar.
Noa Emi is a writer, poet, and student living in “Boston” and majoring in black studies, gender studies, and english. She is concerned with poetics as passage to (and past/passed?) the exterior limits of colonial linguistics, as well as with studies of death, anarchy, and blackness.