Stasia Ward Kehoe Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. It seems to me that every day
Is an audition.

Stasia Ward Kehoe

#5. The dusty library air is electric with secrets/ almost palpable in the thick quiet that bounces between/ Cal and those books and me

Stasia Ward Kehoe

#6. The tips of my overgrown bangs
dip into the wet of my tears.
My fingers, forehead, moisten with sweat.
I fight the slipperiness, press the valves firmly,
play the love, the hate,
the misery, the hope,
the freedom that I wanted, never wanted, can't have;
that doesn't exist.

Stasia Ward Kehoe

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. I am pretty sure the myth of me
Is better than the reality.

Stasia Ward Kehoe

#11. Four laughs vibrate in harmony,
Warm
Delicious
Real.

Stasia Ward Kehoe

#12. 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

#13. I play the music of Steven
for Steven;
ragged, helpless,
it owns me, enveloping me
with an incomprehensible love -

Stasia Ward Kehoe

#14. I calculate the breadth of Steven's shoulders, now wider than mine;
watch him tear open the Blokus game he likes to play with me after school;
count the hours between now and Dad coming home to take over
and I am only a little afraid
of the night.

Stasia Ward Kehoe

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. Thank God there are places
with sounds that make me cry
from beauty,
not from pain.

Stasia Ward Kehoe

#19. Life is a big story. Music is just one way to tell it, to realize how many tales all kinds of people share.

Stasia Ward Kehoe

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. Let's give our slave a big dream. A big future.

Stasia Ward Kehoe

#23. Is truth here
In the ugly unseemliness?
The graceless moments
Before and after
Eyes are watching?
In the unballerina
The unperformed?

Stasia Ward Kehoe