Performance Theory

Catherine Chen

 

1. whereas it was never apparent.
2. whereas moods change, or disperse, according to the annual rate of families who must
   adjust their vacation plans due to generational strife & dispute.
3. whereas all that I want could not be sustained in the hole I lived or in the hole I slept, but
   it was not only a hole of my own, it was shaped, just perfectly, after my likeness. Would I
   be so rude as to say no?
4. whereas the body the salt of the earth the tethering the trembling the feeding the
   famishing is wanting what abandonment refused to accomplish for our survival.
5. whereas my mother is a crow who coos, Hey why aren’t you home? and my father lies
   face down at the sight of trouble, afraid of triggering the injury of once having his wing
   trampled by a biker who, late for pilates, stormed down 1st Avenue.
6. whereas we stood from a distance claiming respect while the children ate their fill and
   threw their ecru bellies into the fray.
7. whereas hunger is not a metaphor.
8. whereas feral life is the little life, the twenty-four-hour news cycle life, the quarterly life.
9. whereas sieves decidedly frame the stage for our impending feast, rain or shine, and all
   the while tiny feet are felt under the crushing weight of wings.
10. whereas an odor months old signals reckoning. Before a word is spoken, they’re off. The
    stragglers know they have lost their chance. But to insert my human position: was
    separation on their mind? Would they eat well later?