[13 dancers: antigone, dora, elizabeth, hafiz, jackson, july, lily, question, second, thom, wind, zombie, zygote]
.the stage set for rearranging stories shuffles the decks of divination under your reclining leather seats..
.the set director may have lost his mind with all that climbing uphill to chart daylight
(and eavesdrop on the newly-unionized writers)..
.the dancers are murmuring secrets in a chain;
holding up the sky
for a coveted benediction..
.you should consult the appropriate manual for an orientation to the masquerade parade of shipwrecks,
ghost trains harboring war criminals..
the theatre’s floors of glass proliferates on the backdrop of video screen..
.all those TVs can be dizzying..
(.keep one foot on the floor..)
.don’t tell anyone what happened in the parking garage..
.interpretations shouldn’t ricochet..
.there’s shrapnel in your hair..
.there’s a game we’re playing that no one understands..
.in a future segment, expect the ice of winter with riddles underneath..
.now’s the time to silence your phones though it’s permissible to share videos on TikTok..
.we’re experiencing an over punctuation with the ego floating downhill
into a polluted mote of random kindnesses..
.the AI set designer’s architectural castle is constructed from stainless steel, celluloid, and cubes of glass..
.jesus sang and wept only once..
.judas hanged himself on a poplar tree while willows wept..
.prepositions fell out of parables..
.no one knew where to go until tomorrow..
.you mustn’t drink the water in the new city..
.don’t climb out of the strange memory of your skin until the chorus instructs—
or turn yourself inside out
unless someone is guarding you..
.you’ve been dreaming—
awakening one finger at a time into the moonlight at midnight..
.the place where you grew sharp stones
and couldn’t speak for years..
.now that we’ve gotten to know each other
we can look away..
.eye contact can be so draining..
.the dancers are getting ready in the green room—
reviewing lines that will change..
.templates were privy to the finest poetry, after all..
.some of the syntax-melodies might coalesce,
find themselves..
.someone else’s consciousness, a reprieve..
.blackbirds fly in sequences that shift the sky..
.the 60-year-old barn, a shamble of floorboards dismantled in the snow—
didn’t own an era..
.premise a: algorithms misfunctioned..
.premise b: needles in the muscles didn’t bleed..
.c: sky was tainted..
.d: no one acted appropriately until much later..