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

This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is an excerpt from Roadmap: A Choreopoem by Monica Prince (Santa Fe Writer’s Project 2023).

Different

AISA
No.
My time, my love, my body—they’re all
just as valuable as yours, magnificent as you may be.
I won’t keep saying yes, stay loyal,
remain a wound for your salty tears.
Just because the world beats you
for being Black doesn’t mean
you get to control me for being woman.

Aisa grabs Dorian’s hand and
places it around her throat.

AISA (snarling)
You want to control someone?

Aisa sinks to her knees with Dorian’s
hand still wrapped around her throat.

AISA
Fine.
But don’t expect love.
Don’t expect me to stick around,
to upgrade you while you drain me.
Don’t expect surrender to grow
where you’ve planted resentment.

Aisa tightens Dorian’s grip.

AISA (snarling)
I am not a game, Dorian.
Don’t. Play. Me.

Monica Prince (she/her) serves as an Associate Professor of Activist and Performance Writing at Susquehanna University and the author of three choreopoems, Roadmap, How to Exterminate the Black Woman, and the recently released FORCE. She writes, teaches, and performs choreopoems across the nation, and she shares her life with her polycule and three disrespectful cats.

Jacob Jardel (he/they) is a CHamoru writer, scholar, and educator born in Guåhan (Guam), raised in California and Oklahoma, and currently based in Kansas City. He’s currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Humanities with a focus in English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. A former Editor for The Sosland Journal and The Central Dissent, his work has appeared in The 580 Mixtapes Vol. 1, Fanachu’s Voices of the Diaspora zine, and No. 1 Magazine. He is also a member of the Garden Party Collective, through which he published his poetry chapbook Full-Blooded CHamaole in 2024. Online, Jacob lives at his website itsjacobj.com, on Instagram and Threads @itsjacobj, and sometimes on BlueSky @itsjacobj.bsky.social. Offline, he lives with his partner, his cat, and his ever-growing board game and Magic the Gathering collection.