The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Roadmap: A Choreopoem by Monica Prince

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Past, Present, Prophecy

DORIAN
…
I’ve been looking for joy
in books and lovers and television
for as long as I’ve known how to laugh.
I won’t stop being scared,
stop wondering if Blackness makes me
predisposed to violence, frailty, and loss. It does.
I know that now. The problem with politics is
you can’t avoid them when your body is political.
I was born with this skin, this fire, this target
painted on my chest. How privileged to not get involved,
to go back to your lives and forget about this flesh
lying on the pavement, one more parent
who doesn’t come home, one more funeral,
one more reason to send thoughts and prayers.

Don’t send them. We can’t use them.

Trauma is the fabric of America.
We love violence and call it human nature.
But I will not sacrifice my beloved
to fetishists of blood. Instead, I will raise a child
with clean hands, who learns what harm looks like
in the fingerprints of others. I want a new tradition
of pleasure in my children, reckless abandon in the name of beauty,
a map drawn in the pursuit of sustained disruption for justice.

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