'like, badass grandma wisdom of 21s' / Josephine Camilla Alexandra
like, badass grandma wisdom of 21’s
a few days later, sharing a bag of almonds with only the circling thoughts, plodding over and over ground, which feels like mud, but, under foot concrete, I slip back to the curtains, a portal where I saw self reflection, acted, the play returns in memory on a night the tram bus combination is leveraged as care, over a will to walk the 9km lonely like a “deflated sack” to bed.
It’s like simultaneously viewing
a coming to age film and critical Q&A session.
songs and clipping up
chain of heart signs between curtains
mark the two leads shifting consciousness;
uncertainty. needs. power. intimacy issues!
a collective reality thread
woven like badass grandma wisdom
I wished I’d heard at 15, but edging up and over 25,
It’s like a mulled wine
Warmed up by the familiarness of laughing,
laughing off moments of my early 20’s. mirrored.
the strong queer females,
and then the nodding hahah dudes listen,
this sharing is a service.
the intimate memoir dances through
from the opening, where black dresses and
milk crate making-up applications stage the
the two friends navigating uncertainties
the politics of desire
to those sober and not so sober moments
nights out with a girlfriend
where; solitude states of mind.
make the tangents of rants;
“a girl can dream about having an honest conversation with man”
lines articulate the teetering ground between beliefs and feelings.
the time shifting tapestry of vignettes
skip from sixteen to nowish.
monologues, comedy and song
reveal the entangled frustrations and confusions
found navigating dating cis-men and
ambiguous queer hangs.
in the process the two,
cut off those blanket thoughts that
are all too familiar
they come to see their own needs,
unfreezing the individuals fearing neurosis
Feelings, guilty of emptiness
interlinked, scenes leak
to the systemic failings
which does not have a place
for females who call bullshit and
interrogate their positions
as gendered bodies
unlearning fatphobia and
eurocentric beauty standards.
feed new learnings
the power in their own selves
calling to the death of chill
and cabaret esque critiques of
crazy!
in the quiet moments where intimacy issues
no longer linger so bright
that one fears the apprehension of
being engulfed
the realisation that we, I’s
are the one’s holding the lighter
don’t ask
babe you got a light
reach in and pull out yours
be firm with the click
the shutters no longer batter
in the winds of kyriarchy
but, prepared to ensure
skater boys
don’t blow in
intimacy issues closes with texting poetics on cardboard signs;
“denial will not protect you”
~
* intimacy issues was performed by India Alessandra and Ivana Brehas at the Butterfly Club, August 12-17th, 2019.
** words, a response by Josie Alexandra.
these words were written on the sovereign and unceded lands of the Kulin Nation.