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[begin transcript] Sit Like One Walk like one; let me sign up for a class. Unless it’s full, then I’ll forget it. Sit like one, legs closed, back straight. All that’s used to be presentable. I’ve always felt shadowed; I made myself smaller. Until I decided what I am is an attitude. To become what is set is too Followed. To become who you always knew is learned. [end transcript]

Name The world is nonbinary; take our sun for example. Nothing truly exists in twos, though humans wish for something so easy. Opposites do not exist. Labels like these fail and fall short. Names are among the first and most oppressive labels we wear. They are a tricky thing to shirk. Choose your own; grow into it. Line: Drawn. Like a system of waiting. The trace of a point in motion. A mark or stroke. A line in a poem. A boundary. A course of action. Generations. Not the two sides but the in between. The word with endless definitions. What I tell people who ask for the origin of my name: Lies mostly. It’s short for Linoleum. My grandmother taught geometry and loved it more than anything; my parents wanted to honor that. It’s not short for anything, it just is. My parents are strange. It’s Scandinavian. They really wanted me to be an artist or writer. It’s short for Linear. It’s like a collaboration with my parents. I picked it out of the air. If you step slightly to the right, it looks like I lie to everyone I meet. I have been ripped apart, skin and organs searched for scar tissue that could lead to hints, first letters of names past. They tell me I am not enough. The rejection, dropping, of what you have been forced to carry. Atlas lets the sky drop onto your toes. Put these on a scale, compare weights: a title shackled to your ankle and the breath you hold in your chest, refusing to fully exhale. What people mistake my name for: Lime. Lion. Lying (“Hi, I’m Lying.” “Why are you lying to me?”) Perhaps lying as in lying down. Leen. Liné. Linah. The taking of last names is a structured erasure of information and history for women. Every last name passed down through birth retains this aggression. However, they might be okay to keep, in small ways, if this issue is understood and other reasons prevail. Surnames denote a history, even if it’s just a fragment. Humans need heritage otherwise the world turns flat, bleak. There are more Kuzniars in Chicago than Poland; it means blacksmith in Polish. My father told me he was the last in the Kuzniar line. He only had sisters and daughters- symptoms of a dying name. This is enough to keep me from dropping it completely. I can be an end. Add it to the dictionary. My mother’s first last name was Sheffler. Her mother’s was Sabol. Her mother’s was Kanakowski. My father’s mother’s was Kaminski. But even these names are the preservation of the father. I cannot change my last name. I’ve tried on other surnames rolling them off my tongue like a giddy teenager gauging the compatibility of a crush. They all flop or break in my mouth. I wonder if lines can run anything but parallel. To take someone’s name is a unification under language and law. But it is a loss of self. If two people became one, half of their matter would implode. This is how black holes are made. If taking a name meant stealing I would decorate my walls with them. Collect. Perhaps I’d start a museum of my names. Curate. But then my people would run around nameless and unable to call out to them, I would be alone with my repurposed titles. To be clear, I do not believe your name can be stolen or cheapened by another. Though, extraordinary people with plain names seem a waste to me. Common names are boring. Given names own you. Tell me how you would be different if you were named Rocket, Sandra, or Skewer. Or Lilac, Ophelia, or Trenkus. Or Pal, Lucy, Riot, Tim, Tucker, Choir, Quiet, Oh. Look me in the eyes and tell me that your very essence, most basic self, is a Steve. Perhaps this is true for some Steves, but surely not all of them. Probably, some not-Steves should be Steve. The success rate of parents giving names, however, is quite low. A few techniques for renaming. Put yourself on the stove over low heat and let it simmer. Boil yourself down. This condensing will leave you with a reduction that spells out your name. Ask a young child, a toddler, to say your whole name. Then pick out the tiny parts that get sticky and assemble a name out of them. Babble without thinking, record it, and pick through the jumble or dissect your name and pick the stranger half to keep. A list of names I suggest: Gruelling task, floridian gesture, unplanned pregnancy, gregorian chant, gross exaggeration, meandering yonder, the larchmont, falter top, randolph hearse, bitch, and the person that grew the biggest lettuce. Or whatever spills out of your mouth first.

#1 The stage remains dark, only slightly illuminated from upstage right. Next to the light is an outdoor lounge chair, and next to this Conrad is lying on the ground with his feet suspended high in the air. He is humming a children’s song (this is for him to decide) and is lightly tapping his palms against the stage. As the light on stage slowly rises, Patricia walks on with a bucket of fried chicken and a blanket. Patricia : Conrad Spenser, what in the fuck are you doin in my backyard again? Conrad : (begins humming louder) Patricia : Conrad! Get outta my fuckin backyard! I don’t wanna tell you again! OUT! Conrad hums very loudly, enough to drown out Patricia calling his name. Patricia : For fucks sake, why do we have to do this every goddamn morning? Conrad : (loudly singing the children’s song, off key) Patricia : Alright! Alright! You can lay there just shut the fuck up so I can enjoy whatever little fuckin peace and quiet is left in this fuckin morning! Conrad goes completely silent, legs still in the air and palms still tapping. Patricia slowly walks and lays in the lounge chair, covering herself lightly in the blanket and reaching into the bucket to take out the first piece of chicken. The stage is quiet except for her chewing and his tapping. Patricia : Why do you always got your feet in the air like that? Conrad : Patricia : I let you stay there, the least you could do is answer my damn question. Hey! Conrad : Such an irrelevant question does not warrant a verbal response. Patricia : How about I kick you off my damn property, does that get me an answer? Conrad : (loudly singing again) Patricia : Alright! I’m sorry! (he stops) Jesus Christ, you oughta work on your social skills kid, I was only askin cuz I’m curious, you little shit. Conrad : It’s restorative. Patricia : (pause) What? Conrad : Since you can’t seem to mind your own business… Patricia : It’s my fuckin backyard! Conrad : …this pose happens to be highly restorative to the mind and allows for the slow release of tension and stress that my body collects throughout the day. Patricia : You coulda just said that you know. Conrad : I don’t come here to engage in conversation with simple minded women who eat fried chicken for breakfast. (immediately starts singing loudly again) Patricia : Listen here you piece of shit! If you don’t leave my property in 10 seconds I’m callin the fuckin cops! Are you listening to me? 10… With every receding number, Conrad slowly lowers his legs to the ground. When Patricia reaches 1, he is lying flat on his back, still singing to drown out Patricia. Patricia : That’s it! I’m so fuckin tired of you ruinin my mornings! I’m callin the cops and you are outta here! Conrad : (stops singing and stands) Thank you for your hospitality. I shall see you tomorrow. Patricia : I think the fuck you won’t! Conrad smiles and mockingly salutes her before quickly grabbing the bucket from Patricia’s side and sprinting off stage. Patricia : You fuckin bastard get the fuck back here! She runs after him, and the stage goes dark. #2 walk with me across palms and i’ll show you how to get lost in a fingerprint. lost in the smooth-tallied and oil-worn, while i ramble across ribbed landscaping, wayward following a blind road map. sometimes i think i must remember how supple these hills felt on fresh skin. how it felt to cuddle against split earth talking of folded time, as if everything we touched was tattooed inside our throats. we step carefully around fault lines until the sun burns too low, and i ask you to picnic here, to stargaze at the bottom of these ravines. but while i am blinded by the compass insisting you are north, you have closed your eyes to hide from the shower of my conversations. you stand, sweat-slicked, and with matted tongue you ask why i brought you here. why i insist this is the frayed spine to stitch ourselves to. but you never truly walked with me, did you? instead, you shared my shoes and forced me to drag you through our reflections, as if afraid to wrinkle the stiff-sole of your own. instead, you magnified yourself larger and buried me in dust so that i may rest as ashes rolled between palms. i know that you never meant to get lost with me, never cared much for my rambles, so go ahead. raise your glass higher and let the sun bring me home. shrink me into a sweaty memory, but know that if you watch my smallness closely, you will only see how beautiful i can be. i dare you to glean yourself an eyeglass and watch me learn to chart bread crumbs into suckled ground, watch me taste pools of salted-silk and still smell the sweet honey under your fingernails. so know i am lost to be lost, bare-buckled and wandering shoeless among the stars so that i might still find meteors in my itchy throat. you remember, the meteors you threw when i asked you to sew us into a burnt midnight. it is dark under your glowering, but at least now i can see the Big Dipper on your right cheek, or Orion’s Belt nestling above your chin, while i claim this world i have walked. i got lost in a fingerprint, in our fingerprints, now i want you to watch me leave some behind. to watch me birth a new horizon i will imprint into those stolen memories. are you watching, darling?

“Is the sun really a star?” Trevor didn’t turn his gaze from the sky. He just nodded. “Is the moon a star too?” This time, Trevor looked at me with a mixture of condescension and amusement as he answered, “What about the moon reminds you of a star?” “I don’t know. You just told me the sun was a star, I don’t know what the requirements are.” Trevor turned to look back up at the stars, peace returning to face. I hadn’t seen him this calm in a long time. Trevor had been struggling with the pressure of graduating but in this moment, his mind seemed to be at rest. “The moon reflects light from the sun; other than that, it’s just a big ball of dust. A star is bursting with energy; fire burning so bright, we can see it from lightyears away,” he said. “Do you know how far away some of these stars are? How bright does a star have to shine to be visible to the naked human eye? I can’t imagine being on fire like that.” “Trevor, they’re stars. I don’t think they feel the fire like we would,” I laughed. “Yeah, but if they could, I bet they’d be miserable burning that bright. All so we can look at them and see their beauty. The least you could do is be grateful,” Trevor looked at me with half a smile. He had stars in his eyes. The calmness of his spirit was so evident on his face, I couldn’t help but release my own tensions. His joy was contagious. I looked back up at the stars and let out a big sigh. I could see why he loved this so much. Normally, we couldn’t see the sky so clearly but we’d lost power on campus that night. Not even thirty minutes after the lights went out, Trevor told me to meet him on the front lawn. I’d heard Trevor talk about how he missed seeing the stars without city lights but I never knew what a difference they made. With street lights and buildings all lit up, it was easy to ignore the stars in the sky. When everything around us was as dark as it was that night, I could finally see just how bright the stars were. As we lay on the grass in silence, I traced patterns in the sky. Games of connect-the-dots formed hearts and faces while crickets chirped their unsynchronized songs. I don’t know what they were singing about but I imagined they sang happy songs. How could they sing anything but happy songs on a night like that? I wish I’d known how bright stars could shine before then. It seems like they deserved to have been admired longer. It might have been too little, too late but on that night, I was grateful for them. That was the only time I ever saw the stars so clearly. Eventually, power came back and the buildings returned to their regular illumination. It didn’t take long for me to fall back into old habits. I would look for the stars every night for almost a week after that night in the grass but they never came back. Another week passed, and I’d forgotten them all together.

In her dreams, she told him he died in his sleep. She dreamt of presenting him with his death. A veiled reaper in his kitchen imparted that he was no longer living. A visage was told of their new existence by a girl. I pushed him up against the wall and cried to him about how I was being controlled. I was possessed with the demon of justice as I cornered him to scream for help. I jabbed his chest and choked him until he understood the abuse. In the diner, I seize his arm and thrust him into the striped wallpaper and howl. I was told that everyone in my dreams is a reflection of me. Troy informed me the people occupying my dreams are me. Troy said when Elton John was in my dream I was Elton John. I am Elton John. I am smothering and cradling myself. I cannot decide whether my ghost is in the way or rather just a vision. I wrap my arms around my waist and still cannot breathe. All my dreams are mirrors that I can no longer decipher. There were two birds dead on the sidewalk. Two birds were smashed into the concrete. Compressed on the ground, there are feathers, blood, and a body. My feet have hissed next to death twice and I’m not asleep. Something is upon me and it feels like neither beast nor flowers.

I’m one southern motherfucker All brokeback and broken teeth, Spitshine and jagged mouth— I whip-crack the sun at breakfast, hoe, I admit, on the Frontier I might not have lived very happily (or very long) All that showdown throwdown Would’ve kept me cheek-to-cheek with dirt, Spine sparking ground like lasso (it’s hard to herd a flame) Truth is, I’m not my ancestors, Or my mama, Too polite to mold a red-clay cuss Over a rattlesnake of a tongue I spit, you shine, shoot twice, Every man within fifty miles Would’ve had a bone to pick with Women Vietnamese fools strays fire Me My people have got no place in history, Too disruptive for our own good Born to shape canyon with screaming skin Of phoenix fist, Our bodies a wail of muscle and redemption My God, what a display we make, All yeehaw and Yippee-kai-yay, Bitch! We are no folk tale, No sand-spun legend, The books threaten to stifle us with dust And still we kick, All the dead lonestars our spurs, our prairie swang, I am a Yellow Rose, your jingle, jangle, jingle, Listen, The gold was in our bones All along We are the railroad The winding streets The ruined mine— Bones— I’m one southern motherfucker Clapback and crooked teeth, Sunshine and smart mouth— The earth has never shaped a miracle, hoe, So we do it ourselves Centuries of grief the pitch beneath our nails, We clutch a ladle, a trowel, a brick, and sing Truth is, I’m the child of my ancestors, As well as my mama They, Who have always been made to do the work A golden corpse Was once forced to guide Bandits to the harvest But now We seize the riches For our own

Thank god they wanted a closed casket. Don’t wanna see what [she] did to [her] face. Her face that held the world in it— her relationship with the world, and her relationship with me. When the world was too hard, she listened to Candy Says again and again; she hated Lou Reed but she loved Candy, and I loved her, and I loved her. Candy said: I’ve come to hate my body, and all that it requires in this world. Persephone said it too. She called herself Persephone but I called her Pandora, I called myself Edie but she called me Eudora. She wanted to return to the Earth what it had given her, when she died. The people that raised her, whose house she fled at eighteen, are as cheap to her now as ever, so I can give her that gift. And I will. There isn’t much to do— no trocars or solutions to deal with. I just have to break rigor mortis, pose and dress her. Easy. I do it all the time. What would she have worn for this? Why don’t I know? How would I know? Tonight is going to take years, like falling into a black hole. I get to spend it taking care of her, though. I am so lucky. I am so lucky to have known her and be known by her for so long. I am so lucky her family didn’t know about us. They’re holding a ceremony in the morning, not for a person, but for the idea of a person. A prop in whom her parents wanted themselves to be, a plaster cast of a good son. They’ll bury her, give her body back to creeping Charlie and violets like she wanted. Can I call it a victory then? They had a headstone made but it’s not for her. Her headstone will be the shifting clouds and a grasshopper, resting for a moment. Her grave will be marked by the grass growing a little greener, forever.

Do Immortals dream of golden sheep? I like to think they crave their sleep. That brief stretch of darkness and breath Is the closest an Immortal can get to Death. If I ripped open their heads, what would I find? Dead, rotting cities, mummified in their minds. A fragmented history so shred apart, Even the Immortals couldn’t find its start. Lives that live for such a time, in time take a hellish toll. Countless wars and countless loves, burning like coal. I hope some images stick in their heads. Would dreams be a cabinet full of calming meds? Maybe they do dream like us during the night. Memories rising under the moonlight. Hidden desires, or some semblance of danger Or, to Immortals, those dreams are strangers. What need would they have for those things? Do they even need the embrace of sleep’s wings? Would the dreams of Márquez, Butler, Shelly, and Poe, Even be a pale comparison to what Immortals know? But what would give an Immortal a nightmare? I doubt before sleep that they utter a prayer. And with no god there to keep minds clean, Are nightmares what they dream or what they’ve seen? Then how could Immortals ever sleep at all? If nought in their minds but nightmares stand tall. But I guess the latter is the truth we seek. Full with nightmares does the waking world reek. Sleep is the Immortals riposte, I’ve found. A sharp jab in Life’s eyes; their only cross in the ground. The world moves much too slow for them to care. Sleep is escape; in their mind’s prison, a tear. I know Immortals don’t care about golden sheep. They’ve made their peace; a deep, still sleep. And knowing that one will have no last breath? I think that Immortals dream of death.

Reverberating voices down the hall and the emphatic resentment of an elevator’s ascent. It’s like they know we’re around. Dreams of citrine silk and confetti exhaust on the floor blurring themselves inside the montage of our untouchable narcissism. The girls have hunger under their intoxicated smiles. Cherry colored sin devours the last of their juvenile vex; the apathy melts around their angel-jaded gazes. Can we let the dizziness of tomorrow’s sunrise blur the glittery residue of adolescent rapture? Or have we crossed the line of premature contingency?

I. tissue an ivory start, a deep golden lock of hair and a magnifying glass. items only seen in a mirror that bends at will— an opening. born out of necessity, a means to an end. my mother’s tissue is expanding to fit us all. II. tether i am unsure if there is a rope or a feeling tethering us together, hand to hand i am unsure if there is a rope or a feeling tethering us together, palm to palm i am unsure if there is a rope or a feeling tethering us together, through the fingerprints we share III. trial and toothache a sack of blood [and] oranges i carry with me over and over, a repeated practice until my knuckles are weary and i can no longer support their purple insides and pith.

I was sick, so sick, but there was no changing the lust in the eyes feeding on my face. The language of flowers and frigid bathwater was my horrific protection of sustained existence. (I was only twenty Dignified in primitive plainness I was transcendent and ideal when I wasn’t clinging to the brush moving wild and unwanted amplified by heartbreak I should’ve known true love wasn’t given This is only earth) I was not speechless but rather stalled at the threshold of scrutiny as every dream passed by me. Tell me, did I look pretty when you dug your poetry out of my hollow stomach? I’m sorry the worms and I ate through your lyrics.

Break out of a prison Enter a new prison Break out of that one Enter a new prison Break out of that one Enter a new prison Break out of that one Enter a new prison Break out of that one Enter a new prison Break out of that one Enter a new prison Break out of that one Enter a new prison Break out of that one Enter a new prison Break out of that one Enter a new prison Break out of that one Enter a new prison Break out of that one Enter a new prison Break out of that one Enter a new prison Break out of that one Enter a new prison Break out of that one Enter a new prison Break out of that one