"Labanotation," "Eight," and "Groyne"

Labanotation

After Ann Reinking

You refashion my body like a Fosse dancer. Turned in toes, bent arms, curved shoulders. During rehearsals I finger snap my way into your heart. Click. Pause. Click Pause. Your notes are full of stick figures and illegible scrawls. Squiggles. Wriggles. I’m not sure if I have them the right way up as I try to copy what could be a sideways shuffle or soft-boiled-egg hand. Yolk. Yoke. In your bed, I’m your jagged little muse. The triple threat of alcohol, Seconal and Dexedrine on your sheets. In a bowler hat, fishnet suspenders and a skin-tight tuxedo jacket I audition for the role of myself in the documentary of your life. It’s a glitter-and-doom aesthetic. Waiting to hear if I’ve got the role, I tuck in my elbows and extend my lower arms, imagine water running over my body and slowly dripping off my fingers.

Eight

There’s a nervous crackle and the deep burn of four beats. I inhabit the 5, 6 7, 8—those moments before it begins. Even before I know you, I am preparing. When we meet, I tell you I’m your lemniscate and you breathe me in, a figure eight of bright air in your lungs. Later, with my pointe shoes ribboned to my ankles, you reach under my skirt and pull down my ballet tights in one motion, quicker than the count from 8 back to 1. On the bed, I lift my stocking-shackled feet and in the 2, 3, 4 you strip and occupy the space between my thighs. I try to count you in, but when you place your warm palms under my hips, there’s only an 8, 8, 8 in a continuous electric loop.

Groyne

At dusk when red sky stripes the pier, fishermen cast their lines into the cool water. Fish wriggle in buckets; their scales are iridescent spangles. Sometimes I think I can hear you in the wind, feel you press my fingers onto the fret board of your old guitar. The wet sand is firm under my feet and the shore is trimmed with a broderie anglaise of broken shells and sea foam. As I dance across the beach, my toes leave dotted trails, the balls of my feet making crescent shapes that fill with water. When I told you tides are higher at night because darkness is not as heavy as sunlight, you pressed me into the sand in one long line of flesh and bone. Under a strawberry moon, we reached for the vanishing point. Now, as the horizon is stained with crimson, I walk down the pier kicking buckets of dying fish into the ocean.