How the Spirit of Death Came into the Factory Yard and Danced: 
A Turn and What’s at Stake

The spirit of death wore a turtleneck and kept his hair
back in a ponytail band. The spirit of death had flowy
pants on. When the spirit of death finished dancing,
the American girl said it was creepy, and the German
girl said he was just so effeminate, and the American mother
said well, he was clearly _____. Where I leave a silence
they shot Lorca and he died against a wall.
Here are the spoken and unspoken rules broken by the spirit of death:
A man does not dance while a woman sings. He dances
while a man sings and a man plays the guitar,
and if a woman dances a man is singing, and if
a woman sings no one will dance. A man while dancing
does not raise his arms above the level of his shoulders;
he does not curve one up, one down like pouring liquor;
he does not curve anything,
least of all his body, least of all the his body’s spine and groove
as though he might bend in the wind
or to other purposes. His turns
are quick and merciless; his feet are knives
and cudgels to keep the snapping ground at bay.
Lorca shivered in New York like a jasmine bush
and could not help going home to die. Here are the rules
death forces all of us to break: your body cannot start
an earthquake. Your body cannot barbecue its bones
till they leap and sizzle on the surface of night; you’re not
a coal-walker, a home for gods and monsters;
inside you is not a vacuum sucking and bending light
as you implode. The _____ man bent and bent, and where
I leave a silence Lorca eulogized his best friend,
or love of his heart, saying horn of the lily
through the green groins, or spearing delirium
through green English, and let his language collapse.
I tell you he had a tornado inside him. Of course
the spirit of death would come to Sevilla like this,
would hear a woman singing and rush to fill
the pounding shoes with moths, surging inside
bodies who loved like his, for whom desire is a door
that must be axed through when the house burns down,
your mother and your lover and your laughter
must stream into the dark now as the house burns down,
and the spirit of death angle gender into its split
and spinning shadow, this is the truth, death queers
us all, the music sang him so.


BY FIONA CHAMNESS

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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.