How the Spirit of Death Came into the Factory Yard and Danced:
A Pack of Similes
Flamenco is like the blues. Of course this assumes
you understand the blues and know what blood tastes like;
let me start again. Like a cigarette that smokes you
backwards. Like lightning stumbling down the stairs
drunk with three old friends she never introduced.
Acid rain stained and scorched through nine generations
of a homeless library. What came before flamenco
became flamenco like grapes becoming wine, pounded
underfoot, like wine becoming vinegar in the bottom
of the barrel or the secret hall of your intestine. It’s like chewing
your way out of prison. Of course this assumes you smell
the larger prison of the world outside, metallic tang
and phosphor of its weeping eye, it’s like digging
into that eye to build a nest for your children or a grave
to fuck and joke in. Flamenco is about death first
and sex second, even when it’s laughing; in fact,
sex has to make room for a lot of things, a hundred songs
about your mother, for example, and songs about lost
homelands, and jokes - but death is the oldest mother,
death is the girl’s middle name, and the first place
you came from, and the punchline. Something happens
to the body in its role as filament of history,
when the city builds a gate and decides which tents must pitch
themselves outside of it, which languages be buried
in the ash, whose backs will break to keep the hinges oiled.
This isn’t about (just) skin, (just) sex, (just) flint,
but the body comes to harbor traces, a sense of humor,
slag heap of the absurd, marks where death saw margin
and laid a supple hand. Flamenco is like your first shot
or first grapefruit, what they drained from the cord
when they cut you in the operating room, and this assumes
you know it’s music, that all of this is music --
like trying to stop a fire by jumping down
and swallowing the matches.
BY FIONA CHAMNESS
Fiona Chamness is a writer, poet, and performer from Ann Arbor, MI. She was part of the 2008 Ann Arbor Youth Poetry Slam team featured on HBO's Brave New Voices and is coauthor (with Aimée Lê) of the poetry collection Feral Citizens, published in 2011 by Red Beard Press. She has performed in Ann Arbor, Chicago, St. Louis, and Hanover, NH. She has also performed on the WU-Slam team at NPS 2011. She has poems published in PANK and Blood Lotus magazines and attends Oberlin College in Ohio.