Can *my* emotions be recycled?
Can they be returned to whoever sent them my way
made me feel all this
Does Karma have a praxis?
Does Karma have a private meme-page-finsta?
{trying not to get cents involved,
but it’s clear sense is missin’ ___u}
The Awakening type of mood / mehmeh // I concur
take this one
Most of ___ur “likes” on social media are from
fake people
People are being paid to “like” ___ur shit
Bots ! are being paid to “like” ___ur shit
Wasted bots are being paid to waste time
On wasted ___u
Digital landfill
Memes saved in My 9 desktop folders labeled
“when I’m coming down with ‘pression and/or c-ptsd
daydream/nightmarez”
*scrambles to audio-read ‘the body keeps the score’*
*scrambles to skim-read ‘psycho-cybernetics’*
*scrambles eggs, eats toast w/ butter right on the counter*
“Like” for a “like” only otherwise ___u refuse
to “like” shit
That is what ___u actually think
And choose to live
irl
Don’t be fooled by digital masks
Some people never hang them
on the wall
Can emotions be wasted?
“Likes” are mosdef a form of emotion waste
There is very little to this finger choreo
“Liking” and longing and lust and love and loss
All in one half of a millisecond aided by gravity
I love L Words in curlier contexts
My eyes are deteriorating slowly as I write this
And during all these thousands of paused minutes
in between
“carrots only” is my grocery list
The cardinal at my backyard pleads with me
Look anew and listen to what matters
Flashes of red
Not mind over matter, mind is matter
Yesterday I watched a woodpecker in my backyard up close
I received a reward simply by noticing
& walking near it, exists
Its/it’s beautiful choreography of winged non-flight
It remained pecking, soft violence in circles
Renewing the ephemeral
My picture of it too blurry to share
There is pleasure in deletion and secrecy
The outline of a moment recorded ad infinitum
Through mine and body
We can hold these truths simultaneously
There is beauty and the world is falling apart
And it’s hard to look at old pictures
Because I miss who I used to be
I feel expired now, more doomed than these artifacts
Spoiled and undone and unfolded and
wrinkled,
still plenty of hair spirals in bundles
I’m not surprised it curls better in collectives
My hair often gets away from me when it can
I pollute wooden floorboards with my teary
debris, tiny tumbleweeds
I sometimes pollute my mind with thinking why
about why those why who’ve left why me behind why why
“I’ve always wanted to feel a warm Mulat”
He whispers in my ear while hugging me
and I
shoved
Anger is the energy of accumulated emotions
An oil that coat covers everything, moistens
It also functions like rain, maybe even thunderstorms of hail
I’ve been told many a time it isn’t “a good look”
If I’m dying, can u hang me upside down and preserve
me intact
Like a rose?
Siri, play “mixed girl blues emo music”
No, play “black grl emo blues”
Blue is mixed &/w black
Play it
I am because u are is some bullshit
I am because trees were
roughly 25% shared genes
We are not hugging trees, we are hugging family
A type that doesn’t let their hand linger
on ___ur lower back or under-boob for too long*
*[see Ari G. @ Aretha Franklin’s funeral]
They have our backs
lung-speaking
What happens when “Bittersweet Symphony” becomes
background noise in a cafe, barely absorbed?
I’m guessing that pessimism doesn’t want to be trendy, but
ends up this way
it’s worshipped as a determinant of lunch table
arrangements
What is the new diet for shitting on people?
I knew every time u had been with someone else when
u told me to “slow down” while kissing
If ___u stack enough issues of Vogue magazine, ___u
can make a small table to hold your dream girl doll house
If my hair is like “a bed of chrysanthemums,” why didn’t u why
pick why me
I love u i love u i love u love u love i u love u love i love I
Meanwhile there’s me, spinning in my tap shoes
Turning the word “scared” into “sacred”
Can emotion be a door?
An entrance to an exit that’s another u?
A cul de sac where people buy too many groceries and
throw them away
A dead end road where I turned my bike around and
kept going back
All ground is a dancing bike lane
I put my foot out because my breaks are broken
____________________________________________________________
THIS— — — — — — -IS— — — — - — -A— — — - — — -GUTTER
made me feel all this
Fake people
digital landfill
Ache people
wall-like IRL shit
Flashes of red between wrinkled debris, tiny tumbleweeds
shoved I am because trees are, lung-speaking
And I, me intact, shoved like a rose
Ends up this way
Dana Venerable
...and my emotions dance their way into the
gutter, let them clog with leafy rain...
“I used to laugh to myself about how, as a woman, your story is often attached to the narrative of a man...No matter what you’re doing or how great your work is, sometimes it’s as though you have to be attached to a man to be validated. I’d felt like that at times. And then I started to read about Mary Magdalene and how amazing she was; how she was likely to have been Jesus’s best friend, his confidante. She was a herbalist and a healer, but, you know, her story is written out of the bible and she was ‘a prostitute’. I found a lot of power in the story of Mary Magdalene; a lot of dignity, a lot of grace, a lot of inspiration.”
—FKA twigs
Dana Venerable is a writer, an occasional tap dancer, co-editor of P-QUEUE, and an English PhD candidate at SUNY University at Buffalo. Her dissertation explores black performance, dance, notation, social choreography, and sound through their intersections and poetics. Dana is invested in how marginalized communities resist against the archive/ record, while (re)inserting themselves within it. She has written for P-QUEUE, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, VIDA Review, and Zoomoozophone Review.