I don’t think we’ve shared eyes before staring past each other’s ruins like leaves on a forest floor dried brown. Every look, a kin syllable. The gaze—a previous seeing, shutters in shushing sounds. I’d graze between words to catch sight again, knowing that vision is a deadbeat to aural attention, a long-winded preference steeped in catacomb grounds— blink beneath the earth, blink as if gender were a demon unkilled & sight were sound.
Sandra Ruiz, the Sue Divan Professor of Performance Studies at UIUC, is the author of Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance, Left Turns in Brown Study, and Tears for Tears: Aesthetics in Grief Minor. Ruiz has published poetry in Apogee Journal, Hooligan Magazine, and in the Writing Matters! series at Duke University Press. Ruiz produces the experimental Minor Aesthetics Lab.