Isolation/Skinner Releasing
by Petra Kuppers
Spider sticks up
knee impetus,
elbow softens
into query:
clock ticking, rain drops.
Smell of pressed wood panels
skull strings just above my ears
portal opens:
synth riffs up doors to stars
Uneven floor city grime beneath naked toes
Hip sockets run loose melt into the wooden grain.
Deep drums yank into mammoth rhythm.
Fat runs in billows over the first floor,
harmonics race in midsummer arches.
Light floods
arc of flax tension jolt up
golden lines to universe.
My eyes fly over exercise yard.
I step into the installation
No one’s puppet but my own.
Blood pounds, upward vocal reach,
circular plates drench me in color.
Hips flange out: moth wings.
Red vestibule, stained glass
string winds around Mars, tugs up.
Bones melt into wax
dark cathedral light
About Petra Kuppers
Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a disability culture activist, a wheelchair user, and a community performance artist. Petra grew up in Germany, and grounds herself in disability culture methods. She uses ecosomatics, performance, and speculative writing to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. She teaches at the University of Michigan and is also an advisor on the low-residency MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College. She is the Artistic Director of The Olimpias, an international disability culture collective, and co-creates Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio, with her wife, poet and dancer Stephanie Heit, from their home on Anishinaabe Territory, in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Her third performance poetry collection, Gut Botany, was named one of the top ten US poetry books of 2020 by the New York Public Library. Her next academic book is Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters, University of Minnesota Press, February 2022. https://www.petrakuppers.com/