by Kathleen Rooney
photo from “Cursed Stock Photos” twitter account
HOW TO ACT
All the neighborhood’s a stage, an open-air space for viewing spectacles and plays.
A hearse idles outside the church—I haven’t seen one in a while. Rainwater drools from the mouth of a gargoyle.
Hope you like gothic flourishes and circular plots, because that’s what the script calls for!
Who will play my complicated Byronic hero? With only our own eroticism to keep us warm?
I don’t know how to play this scene, but the show goes on. Spiders are never too creatively blocked to weave their webs.
Is our response to any catastrophe is its own disaster? Every god a jester, every jester a god.
A tableau of spirit. The rays of noon illumine the city.
The instrument I’m hoping to master here is me.
No life could be more real than this. Scarlet cardinal ad-libbing in a maple.
Is art the human response to the shock of mortality? My character lifts her middle finger. Salutes reality.
In ancient Greece, you could sit in auditoria cut into hillsides with ten thousand other people.
The critics steeple their fingers and softly say, hmmm.
An actor’s heart-rate rises the instant they have an audience.
“My first act of free will,” wrote William James, “shall be to believe in free will.”
Behold! Smoke from chimneys. The blackest comedy.
My longing is to perform so well that in the end I’m lashed to death by flowers from the crowd.
I search for stage directions in the airplane contrails, but the only place they lead is back to the plane.
What do I do now? Someone tell me what to do.
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She teaches in the English Department at DePaul University, and is the author of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (St. Martin’s Press, 2017) and the World War I novel Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey, forthcoming from Penguin in August of 2020.