Audition Quotes

“I feel his arm
Lightly
Over me.
He takes one of my outstretched hands.
Draws it beneath my stomach.

"One more time..."

This is not sex,
Not friendship.
Something
Strange
Special
In the stillness of his breath,
The waterlike way he moves.

He is making a dance.
We are making a dance.”
― Stasia Ward Kehoe, Audition

“I am pretty sure the myth of me
Is better than the reality.”
― Stasia Ward Kehoe, Audition

“Wish my life were inside a book
So I could turn to the ending,
See if it is a love story
Or a gothic disaster.”
― Stasia Ward Kehoe, Audition

“It is strange to hear my words
Read back to me.

I don't think I wrote them
To have them ever leave the page.

I think I only write
What happens across my brain
When my feet are too weary
To dance anymore.”
― Stasia Ward Kehoe, Audition

“Am I lonelier now
Than when my sad imagination
Had him disappear?
Heart torn,
Loosing tiny droplets
Of sorrow
No tape can measure
No needle can mend.”
― Stasia Ward Kehoe, Audition

“Do I dare ask him for what I want,
As if I knew it,
Could find it on some page
In some chapter
In some book?”
― Stasia Ward Kehoe, Audition

“Does it matter that people and things
Have words,
Have names?

If not,
Why read any book?
A litany of useless letters
Detached from bone, muscle.

Or are words the only things that make the muscle, bone, memory, movement,
Person
Real?”
― Stasia Ward Kehoe, Audition

“Her body disappears like my voice
When I look too closely in the mirror
Without the pages of a notebook, a pen
To save me.”
― Stasia Ward Kehoe, Audition

“Is truth here
In the ugly unseemliness?
The graceless moments
Before and after
Eyes are watching?
In the unballerina
The unperformed?”
― Stasia Ward Kehoe, Audition

“I hover over myself
Watching.
Mind and body separated,
Each in control
As though there are two puppeteers
Working the strings of my marionette self.”
― Stasia Ward Kehoe, Audition

“It seems to me that every day
Is an audition.”
― Stasia Ward Kehoe, Audition

“I wish I could concentrate on dancing
Instead of spending so much time pretending
I am still in junior high
But with Rem, I want to be sixteen
Or, like Alice in Wonderland,
Sometimes smaller,
Sometimes bigger still.”
― Stasia Ward Kehoe, Audition

“Are we alike
In that in-betweenness?
Can he see,
When I smile my blue eyes back
At his brown ones,
The country-city-woman-girl
Dancer, student
Bewildered
Unbelonging
Yearning?”
― Stasia Ward Kehoe, Audition

“What was true and solid begins to slide, dissolve.
Your thoughts unravel faster than a satin ribbon
Whose edge hasn't been burned
Until you sit amidst a tangle of limp, pink threads,
Unable to reason
At all.”
― Stasia Ward Kehoe, Audition

“Now, the edges of these memories sharpen.
I see the cracks in the studio floor beneath her feet,
The lack of turnout in her fifth position.”
― Stasia Ward Kehoe, Audition

“Four laughs vibrate in harmony,
Warm
Delicious
Real.”
― Stasia Ward Kehoe, Audition

“Dare I tell them that since I came here to dance
I have been giving pieces of my body away
To ridiculous diets,
To repeated injuries,
To Remington?

And that maybe
I think
With each bit of my body

I lose a little piece of my soul”
― Stasia Ward Kehoe, Audition