Angela Duggins is currently a Ph.D. student at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Il, USA where she studies rural performance and the efficacy of persuasive performance. She holds two previous degrees in performance and communication: one from Harding University and another from East Tennessee State. Her original compositions have been performed on stage at festivals across the United States. Through performative and autoethnographic poems, she explores themes of access, oppression, and exoticization as they particularly apply to Ozark culture and performance depictions of Ozark culture. Her research has been presented at the annual conferences of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, MidAmerica Theatre Conference, the Association for Scholarly Theatre Research, and the Denver University Women’s Conference. She currently serves as the junior cochair of the graduate student subcommittee for the Association of Theatre in Higher Education. She has a coauthored chapter in the forthcoming Handbook of Organizational Autoethnography.
Special Collection: Creativity in the Time of the Pandemic 2020>>
Before the World Stood Still
Before the world stood still, I did not exist.
I left my exoskeleton behind
when I ripped myself out of my home,
stumbled,
to climb the halls of green ivy.
I knew
that only when I ground my voice
down to its smoothest form,
bashed it against echoing cliffs,
would I get to speak for the shell of my memory.
I am Ozarker.
I am a child of the red clay.
I know which fish to fry.
I know which mushroom to eat.
I know which path to hike.
I know
the cold of a 5:00 a.m. gun
as dawn melts away.
I can provide when food cannot be bought.
I am wounded.
I know the feeling of a hand flat across my face.
“don’t tell anyone”
I know when to look away.
“Nobody gets to know our business”
Take a trash bag out to the dumpster and walk away.
Wait ten minutes.
It will walk away
Maybe it had something white in it.
maybe it had something green.
Maybe it was harmless.
“Maybe you need to mind your own business.”
I’m safe now
in a university town
with quaint little shops
and consent posters
and a script on my desk
that says
“my people are good
and they deserve to be heard”
But the world has stopped,
and there are people
watching the decay of the shell float by:
Winters Bone
Ozark.
They see the darkness.
They see the hand slam into my face,
the cigarette press into my leg.
I get a text
“Is that your life?”
And…
And…
“Yes”
But there is more.
There are sunsets
and red clay towers
and bonfires
and baby showers.
Before the world stood still,
I did not exist.
Now, I half exist,
And I don’t know which is worse.
Published on May 04, 2020. © Author.