Award Winning Poem: majestic disabled/queer/people of color elders instruct how to dance in the struggle

Cid Pearlman Performance announced the four poets whose work will be featured in the dance/video/art installation (home)Body, which premiered at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History in January of 2022. This project is made possible by the Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship at the Community Foundation Santa Cruz.

majestic disabled/queer/people of color elders instruct how to dance in the struggle

(c) Naomi Ortiz

drag that chair out to the dance floor
find your own damn beat
the one that brings chin, shoulders, hips, wrists alive
with palms open, grasp air abundant from sky, pull down into lungs, embrace
sit, sway, take a minute, before arms emboldened
cross, to caress chest, spirit, soul

The lyrics might steam with desire, cumbia with done me wrong, but what they really say is, when there is struggle, there also must be a tending of joy
how do we tend joy?

there’s no secret
you can’t, with just the power of your mind, actually will things to change
yet, every ancestor who came before, seasoned that shoulder pump and jut with optimism

fingers will always trace where you end and the world begins
the mistake is to not understand movement
is sensuous love, exalted joy, a return to the singular pain of being alive
movement smells like salty sweat sobaco
the cataclysmic sulfur of creation
blessed juniper smoke drenching space from bundle lit

grrrl, you can’t pound the floor with clenched jaw
you gotta open that mouth to sing
to determine the taste
to chew up and spit out
digest truth through body, to soil

it all goes back to the soil

with those hands waving up - reach out
touch what lives at your side, your other side
shimmy weight from hip, to hip to balance
constitute ground
own those spastic, rhythmic vibrations to unearth
the foundation underneath which was tolerated before
destabilize the expected
endure surprise, the soft punch to the gut

pause, in the middle of everything,
rest

then, return fist to center, ribcage, breasts
twirl heart need between fingers
wrist rotate to catch the stem
pull it up towards light
with a swing, thrust
release

(First published in Jacket2.org as part of the EcoSomatics Archive 2020)

The (home)Body Poets are:
JJJJJerome Ellis
Willie X. Lin
Naomi Ortiz
Tanaya Winder