I ask why I can’t speak
for myself. Why must the breast
speak for the body, and the leg
for the knees, and what is
the assemblage of the body
if its dance promises it to a nakedness
that entertains rather than
directly discloses?


I ask the one hand why it applauds itself with another hand and wherefore
my nakedness bows to it.

When entertainment is a narcissism of the audience, my
joints begin to ache and my grin broadens, super-elastic, because
bare nakedness is a joke, but who is it a joke on?

Then, yes, the performer bows, but it isn’t really me bowing.
It’s an alternative body acknowledging its own performance
inside the hoot and call of those clapping hands. If I call the dancer
me. If her name

is Josephine (a name in fact I picked out for myself),
then the performance is a confession that looks out to the audience
waiting to see what it, too, will divulge.

My costume is my nudity. But the people of the audience speak for me
as rhythm: they keep coming back.

A smack and a clasp where the clapping hands speak only to and for themselves.