Escape Velocity’s Rest Chorus
Escape Velocity
minimum speed needed for an object to escape from contact with or orbit of a primary body. in other words: the slowest rate to take flight
Poetry and music are two ways I practice escape velocity while living with chronic illness and dynamic disabilities as a Black gender-expansive woman. As offering to this For Colored Girls Museum exhibit in honor of Lucy among our mothers and birthing parents of gynecology, I offer my poem: “This Body, That Body, Next Body” . I dedicate these words to my Beloved community, my own family lineage, and all those who live(d) and are living with issues of blood. These experiences such as endometriosis, adenomyosis, fibroids, pmdd, and yet to be named manifestations of our own afterlives of slavery vary among us, and repeatedly connect us. But it’s not just inherited pain that bonds us, it’s our reclamation as furiously as dancing towards a bodily autonomy only you and your memories of that body, this body, and next body knows that we’re fighting for.
“I want you know, I believe you.”
As a critical Black feminist performer and autoethnographer, first my words were for me, but now and then and again and again, they're for you too.
As I embark on a journey with creative partner liana asim to explore “Escape Velocity”. There are three invitations here:
Read The Poem
Listen To The Chorus
Contribute Your Voice
lead artists and contributor bios forthcoming
Every healthful narrative needs a narrator or narrators to amplify the listening, learning, and creation of shared wellbeing — or what I term "community euphoria".
This poem was written while resting and wrestling with time, place, [dis]embodiment, and the experience of visiting Lake Coatepeque, El Salvador where the “hill of snakes” became a brave place to undress my relationship to my bodies. These words came forward in the care of Beloved community.
Artist Bio:
Dr. Shanaé Rebecca Burch (she series or NaéBur) is a nomadic artist, independent researcher, and nonprofit leader focused on health liberation for the generations before and after. She is in her first year as the President & Fractional CEO of Community Conversations: Sister to Sister, Inc (Cambridge, MA) and third year as a Deacon of Double Loved Experience Church (Brooklyn,NY). Originally born in Los Angeles, CA and raised bi-coastally between there and NJ from teenhood onward, she considers home where her people are and where she has passed through... New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York, Georgia, California, and the future she came from where we commit to the daily practice of Black liberation and Indigenous sovereignty with Black feminisms' somatic notion of abolitionisms.
Weaving her lived experiences as a Black woman, gender-expansive citizen, and as both a disabled and chronically-ill poet, naebur contemplates her art as a healing form of scholarship through theatre, collage, poetry, and stand-up comedy (for one in her bathroom mirror). She is the co-associate editor of Poetry for the Public’s Health, a department of the academic journal, Health Promotion Practice. You can learn more about her at www.shanaeburch.com or on Instagram as @naeburnarratives.
Contributors:
Liana Asim Bio:
Lover of words and life. Grateful for the journey. To God Be All The Glory