CW: spontaneous human combustion.
What is storytelling if not our duty to necromancy? Our duty to bring life to ashes? This poem was largely inspired by society’s response to The Dancing Plague of 1518, a notable instance of the virus-like phenomenon of people frantically dancing themselves to collapse and even death. To this day, no one knows what caused these outbreaks, yet, centuries later, its nebulous and horrific occurrence continues to call scholars and artists to reanimate history into a mirror of the present. In exploring the act of creation as a reflex from gaining knowledge, “in your mind, they still dance” is after Juliano Zaffino’s “Strasbourg” and is in conversation with Florence + The Machine’s Dance Fever.
it started with one)
like blood
simmering in a pan, a woman’s
nerves begin fire. pre-jive
jive in the streets, fire she becomes
as the pulse of the plague. Feverish
flailing channeling survival mode’s
strength. quadriceps and calves
shift like magma. Captured
in freedom, energy sprouts
from her split ends. her spine is
her own jump rope, teeth
her new limbs. a different
way of seeing red; roses wither
within a ruby moat. a vermilion
spider web in each eye grows each sleepless
night. she ravages through two beets, two feet
serving as her jaw. a bird bound to earth / a root
lacerates the sky. she spreads herself to nothing
and everywhere, reaching each dodging
molecule in the air. her majestic convulsions
summoned the feed. the pull sucks the storm
into itself. like grasped hands lining up every
crease.
once kin to the truth, one’s part of the mystery.
it then became one)
a show has no bystanders.
they all join. flapping and swimming:
swarm like gray hair: thick and crooked.
a virus to expel poison. ripped stories
slapped into papier-mâché
firewood. spontaneous misalignments
wrapped into unison. some say there were
hundreds. fusing dimensions.
For a moment, they made
their stage. They burned.
For a moment.
