Break-Rain
When it rains, I try to sing in the octave of night. My voice goes funk-hoarse. It’s been raining tuplets & crazy riffs for three days & nights. It’s been raining droplets encapsulating tiny dancers, ones resembling Judy Garland or Gene Kelly. It’s been raining an old hardcore rain. Because of the rain, Zin & I are trapped inside on a dance floor. She tries teaching Fred Astaire grime & rave. But he insists on doing the Fox Trot with her across the floor of bodies fluctuating to a dubstep of 190 beats per minute. He says “Girly, we’ll never get rich with proper dancing broken beat, but you sure have one mean funny face.” Zin insists that Fred ride her beat. Inside the club, it starts to rain.
The Acrobatic Dance
In a modern dance, she’ll love like a foolish princess miscoding dangerous mimes. He performs large leaps in a city of anti-Expressionists. With articulated pelvis & flexible spine, he’ll steal her polyrhythmic heart & her best foot thongs. Her side aerial view of dreamless pedestrians is: all fall & no recovery. They have such stiff knees. But her. She likes the swizzle & the round-off. The amazing handspring. Sex is contact, twist, release & surprise. After-sex is a forced giggle & a broken toe. A girl prettier than she will arrest him in a slow dance. With limbs isolated, with the gravity of her own weight & resistance, she’ll perform tricks solo. Or take a day job at The Watermelon Trust. She’ll be an Isadora without scarves or suicidal lovers. She’ll laugh at her own crippled nymphs.
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Kyle Hemmings lives and works in New Jersey. He has been published in Elimae, Smokelong Quarterly, This Zine Will Change Your Life, Matchbook, and elsewhere. He loves cats, dogs, and garage bands of the 60s.
Lead image: “deep space – cielo nyc” (via Flickr user sookie)