Poetry by Carrie Bennett
“the director instructs: make your body
into a tree .”
Poetry by Carrie Bennett.
These poems are erasures/partial erasures/contain specific language from Judith Butler's essay "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution" and/or reference Marina Abramovic's performance art.
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[Dress Rehearsal]
She stands center stage from a distance
the director instructs: make your body
into a tree close your eyes you are the tree
make breath a door without hinges
don’t think too much your job is not to think
your job is to be all body
let your body speak in stillness & desire
the audience will watch don’t worry
about the blank darkness it will come
& you will greet it with love
this is a generous act how you give yourself
don’t forget your body is not your own
when you sleep different acts
will be done that you won’t remember
do not fear the audience will have fun
all objects have a purpose a piece
of glass to fill with water you
will watch it sink
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[Mask Monologue]
S: I found a dark hole & fell down Deep in the
ground dust & wood soot & clay I found
a floor to fall down I just moved I moved
farther away falling a wall small squares
hands I was fallow I fell until lightloud
a breaking began to stray hidden there in
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[Costumes]
She is always ready on stage over time the body grows like a tree within fields compelling fictions or sedimentation as a view S says there are cores to conceal this world or is it corpses to carry one no a coup a coupling a compulsion compels the script I am always wrong in this body barely buried away but when the body is planted find the right container
Her performance begins in 15 minutes / time to prep & preen / pamper & ponder each inch / this is S’s big moment / to prove her worth
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[Scene Two: A Greek Chorus]
A chorus speaks / surrounds S in a semicircle / o pretty pattern / o lacy bras & G-strings / o body odor / o armpits slathered with soap / o counting down the razor / quick cut the wax & pull the worry stinking up the room / o perfect breaths & mouths / perform your duty perfumed / o putrid underside / o belly burdened with so many holes / o doesn’t it feel good / to be observed / from this distance / /
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[Scene Three: Organizing the Body]
Head bent over
S sits under a lamp
sorting bullets
what is hidden
inside each dirty
shell & flesh
her feet pushed
into a bucket
of more bullets
sunflower seeds
pollute the skin
another organ
that waits
wanting/wasting
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[Scene Four: The Operation]
The metal beds S naked
the operation takes two hours
in the theater glass walls seats we
look down at her first the body
is put to sleep
a set of numbers
told backwards
S becomes a piece
of glass or an animal
that doesn’t matter or matters
even less
than her animalself
suffer the prying
o hidden incision
all that is sacred/scared will
be forgotten
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[Intermission]
All night S start here
dies on stage there once
suspended was a hole
by a thin in a frozen
string a single ground
star shines thick plastic
so dark walls glowing
it becomes red under
a punctured the ceiling
clot or I new rituals
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[Curtain Call]
Years go by / S stays inside / light-filled trees & the hole becomes a mouth then hands everywhere hands & arms / bodies pressing faces & more mouths / when a stage remains silent it is already gone / /
S is a play / she doesn’t know & rake away / the words & drugs sex & time /the tree is naked look how the tree stands there / taking what you / give it
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Header image courtesy of Meggan Joy. To see more of her work, go here.
Carrie Bennett is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellow and author of biography of water (The Word Works), The Land Is a Painted Thing (Word Works), and several chapbooks from dancing girl press: The Quiet Winter, Animals in Pretty Cages, and The Affair Fragments. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Caketrain, Denver Quarterly, jubilat among others. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently teaches writing at Boston University.