I skim across the floor at breakneck speed -

Like a spider that runs on water

        and never tears through the surface.

I feel the wind on my face and

        hear it rushing past my ears

As the floor falls away beneath my feet.

Gravity has given up its fight, at last,

And released me to the sky.

I enter the gruesome gates of Ballet Hell

In ten minutes I will stand before a glacial director,

In a line of nameless, faceless bodies,

Praying that God pulls me out of that line -

and gives me a name and a face.

I am waiting to begin the audition,

Waiting to learn my destiny.

One-by-one, fifty dancers will pour out their hearts

        through their hands, their feet, and their eyes.

One-by-one, fifty dancers will have their love and future

        twisted away.

And, yes, we pay them for this.

A smirking lady hands me my number:

        the tangible epitome of the audition

It still retains its dizzying smell of magic marker.

I have been stripped of my identity -

Dehumanized by the graffiti pinned to my leotard;

For the next two hours my name will be:

Number twenty-eight.

Hair is deliberately coifed in a skull-gripping bun

Each girl inventories the bobby pins

         that imprison her hair.

She is invaded by fiery music

That turns her eyes and twists the corners of her mouth.

Against her own volition, she is willed to move

By a maddening, delicious force.

Her feet propel her through the air

Her head slings back to face the sky…

Her hands clap in counter-rhythms that her brain can’t comprehend…

Her belly undulates above her hips - that shake in figure eights.

And she has no idea where her arms will pull her next.

Sweat falls from her forehead; her hair clings magnetically to her skin;

She is dizzy and her head aches as tough she’d fasted forty days.

But still her heels stomp into the ground and her fingertips fly into the air…

She has surrendered all control to this auditory poison.

And she is drunk on the spinning of her skirts.

Please take me to:

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