May 2024
We hot-wire our bodies, & tell the genocide  
     it hasn't won. By god, it is wont to do,  
but by god, it won't! We twist ourselves into crazy

eyed shapes of refusal. In these times, dance  
     is a decision to move beyond survival.  
Dance arms the body  

to suffer the art of witness.  
     Once, at Papi Juice, I shared an atomic  
kiss with a woman before we ever lip-synced  

our names for the other. Her beads of saltwater  
     two-stepped across her handsome brow, her sweet 
clavicle. And oh, what I didn't taste— 

the dust that's left of our neighbors' houses. 
     Here, in a beer-stained dancehall in Brooklyn,  
the hinge of an elbow is so much more  

than proof of the living. We duggie for wild happiness  
     we do not have the right to,  
yet,  continue to take.  

We do our best to leave the body  
     count at home for a few bottled-up hours. We jack  
jack jack our still-beating shoulders. Ball-change 
 
the tires of our bodies. We crisscross 
     our feet on purpose, on rhythm, ON GOD!  
I know the pheromones  

of genocide live rent-free on the body even here— 
     the strobe lights across the ceiling of the club  
open us back up 

to the missiles from moments ago. 
     But when I go to the party, I fish  
& cruise in a sea  

of brown somebodies—my god!  
     All of us somebody's 
somebody!

Sa Whitley is an Assistant Professor and Poet of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University in the School of Social Transformation. They are a Cave Canem Fellow and the winner of the 2024 Indiana Review Poetry Prize. A black queer non-binary person, they enjoy dance parties, desert hikes, and sci-fi TV shows that imagine and portray the toppling of oppressive empires, prisons, and authoritarian regimes through collective struggle.