Dance, Don't Read

I wanted infection.

Drawing done by Margarita Dikova

The final step in the BEEF - VOLUME 1 release was always a dance.

So much of reading is tactile. It’s holding the book, turning the page forward and backward, re-reading the top paragraph now that you understand the bottom of the page. It’s touching the words, feeling the paper, turning to the author’s bio, and absorbing the title, until the book becomes part of your physical being.

The feeling I get reading a book lives in my body.

I’ve done a couple of readings the regular way. You hold the paper, they sit and listen. There is an assumed authority with a microphone, standing in front of people, blowing your words into the air for them to grasp if they can. You are so focused on reading that you can hardly look at the audience. There is nervousness, for sure, but also a certain distance and emotional disconnect, at least for me.

I wanted infection. I wanted my body to perform the words.

I cut down the 57-minute audio track from the original BEEF - VOLUME I post into a 10-minute beginning, middle, and end. I mixed the music underneath the prose to make a song of fiction, slicing the three sections together with the same tango-influenced beat I used for the transitions in the original publishing.

I went out and bought a speaker, gambling on whether it would even throw enough sound for the room, but Book Suey already had the sound rigged. All that was left was for me to sync to their Bluetooth and hit play the moment I stepped into the light.

I felt so nervous about the performance. I most certainly did not want to go up in front of these strangers and listen to an edit of my story for ten minutes with them, while pretending I had any business calling whatever I do dancing.

I had to be intentional. I thought of rules for each of the three sections for my body. I found myself practicing little moves throughout the week, trying to imagine myself in the experience.

The day of the event, I tried for two minutes to dance alone to the recording, and that shit might as well have been an hour. I checked the odds on Polymarket: absolutely no chance I was actually doing this.

The reading took place as part of New Innards, an event created by Owolabi Aboyade to honor and celebrate the new kidney he received via transplant in November 2025. Owolabi and I reconnected over Substack a couple years ago, but we actually met eleven years ago through his sister, who led me to a Detroit park one Sunday afternoon, where I watched his rap performance the first year I moved here, completely enthralled.

The room was filled with heavy, vital voices. Margarita Dikova read from her poetry chapbook “Poems from the Never Ending House Pests” and spent the rest of the night sketching us while we performed. Ruby Woods mixed ritual and singing into her poems. Chandler Haviland brought the body: chronic illness, trans experience, the humanity people want to make into politics. Owólabi Aboyade closed with J Dilla, Conant Gardens, Black resilience and contradiction.

For my introduction, the host read my answers to her prompt below in lieu of a traditional bio. Her reading my answers is where the video begins.

If we take “A Chorus of Sweet Survival” to mean the calliope of things we use to bring us life, make a rambling list of things in your chorus of sweet survival.

Then, I walked up and pressed play on my iPhone.

For the first section, I was supposed to keep my hands in my pockets, the way the main character begins the story: locked inside himself. The second and third sections would free me. My body bounced to the words and tried to find whatever rhythm it could hold.

I was supposed to look at the audience. Instead, I looked into the words in my feet, while I moved.

I thought about how my body felt. How vulnerable the words sounded. Could I move to make the listener more present? Could I move to make the words stick in your head when you heard them?

I felt hot.

I started to cry.

I didn’t know if they could tell.

I made sure to look at the audience enough to let them know I wasn’t scared.

You tell me.