Kathleen Heil

KATHLEEN HEIL

Coming Attraction

Possibilities have always been preferred over endings
it is a question of entry into feeling contained before
it becomes silent

                        You called three times and it was over
it was ended we played our versions of our movie
in our heads for it was over it was

                        Then that I called you and my voice was sent to yours
from across great distances a transmission you listened you spoke
into a device that was closer to you than I was this is sometimes
a metaphor and this time it was

                        Shitty I feel shitty you say and I do too
is also sometimes how you feel after seeing certain movies
you want that part of your life back although you can't have it
back you had gone to see it because you had liked the preview
but not the movie it was awful this is sometimes
not a metaphor for anything it was

                        Then that you told me when I received your voice
in the receiver that you'd had a movie in your mind that morning
about a time when your mother was doing the dishes and
you were small you wanted to tell her something and
you were going to let your voice be received but
then you noticed her leaning over the kitchen sink crying
lost in the reverberation of her own private movie and
then you knew something that you hadn't before

And that was



less like an object and more like the weather

Let's leave the pliés and spinal curves and attitudes out of it,
unless they serve to keep our bodies warm. Cunningham said dance
“gives you nothing back…no paintings…no poems…nothing
but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.”

I could feel the weight of my bones gather what was left
of the waxed floor and find in the fascia a quiet joyous potential,
alive to the impish capacity of our joints to do what we don’t expect
to our gratitude. Surprise yourself if you can at least once a week,

find a way to get from a to b without using your fore or hind limbs, or
from b to a using only your memories. Merce was waiting for me there
on the platform, the local had switched to express and told no one,

so I told him about the time I saw five dancers push at the limit
of what moving meant: one dancer giving up a backward curve
so generous her lambent head nearly emptied of logic.

512 hours
Marina Abramović, London

The Serpentine walk we were led down led us to expect redemption
in the form of art. We got there and I lay down, defeated; you walked around.

People were enacting their ideas about being watched; they wanted to be;
you were weary because they kept telling you what to do—a flaw

in the texture of the artwork, a flaw in the texture of life itself—m
while I wanted to lie there all afternoon. When was the last time

you were in a room, sleeping, and there was light left in the day, and
twenty-some-odd people? Heads down, there was nothing left to perform

except the good will in that drawn space, which we attuned
through the white of our noise-canceling headphones—m

Kathleen Heil is a writer, choreographer, and translator. Her poems, stories, essays, and translations appear in The New Yorker, FENCE, Colorado Review, Two Lines, MAKE, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Threepenny Review, and many other journals. A recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, among others, she lives and works in Berlin. More at kathleenheil.net and on Instagram @kathleen_heil.