we weren’t meant to survive light & still we wish upon stars desire is more expensive than freedom & freedom that prickly illusion touching the sightless for more grace we look up we are people of the night sky moon kin eyes ascend counter-vision assemblies tilted heads & bent necks muses wilted by delusion & still we stomach destiny spiraling into nebulas mist dreams become mist & still we wait island universes hold our petition there’s nothing timid about hope it shakes shame into submission & relents to humility & splinters time into aerial armies & still we obey longing over logic & swallow the stars in measured radiance for the most delicate designs we look up we lookUpwelookUpwelookUpwelookUpwelookUpwelookUpwelookUp we
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.