What You Dare to Open at the Threshold

Donika Kelly and Mindy Myers performing on screen

Choreographer: Melinda Jean Myers
Poet: Donika Kelly
Video Editor: Nick Coso
Performers: Donika Kelly and Melinda Jean Myers

WHAT YOU DARE TO OPEN AT THE THRESHOLD

Donika Kelly

Open your eyes to a present bare
as a winter tree, the tree a raw nerve,
not dead but at rest. A mistake to think

now is always; soon enough the bud
and bloom, the green leaf and husked fruit.
Soon enough the small jaw makes of the hard shell

dust; makes of the sweet meat a feast. What wild
soft hope to suppose that what was will be.
For now, take the attitude of work,

then the attitude of rest, then work,
a curious industry, then rest. For now,
grab the hand that pulls you up, the hand

that gets you dressed, the hand that soothes you
when you wake in the dark, startled and damp.
Is the hand your own? So be it. Is the hand

another’s? So be it. There is a future
in your mouth, smoky quartz on your tongue.
Where will you hold it: belly, teeth, or palm?

Melinda Jean Myers
Melinda Jean Myers is a dance artist, choreographer, and Assistant Professor of Contemporary Dance and Choreography at University of Iowa. She earned her BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts (2005) and her MFA from the University of Iowa, where she was the recipient of a Stanley Graduate Award for International Research and an Iowa Arts Fellowship.She was honored to perform internationally with the Trisha Brown Dance Company for four years (2006-2010), and currently re-stages their repertory. She created three new works as a devising ensemble member of Lucky Plush Productions (Chicago, IL) and toured nationally with the company for five years (2012-2017). While a member of The Cambrians, her collaborative work Clover (2015) was named one of The Chicago Tribune's Top 10 Dances of 2015. She was chosen to produce her one-woman cabaret greatBIGworld through High Concept Laboratories’ Sponsored Artist program at Mana Contemporary in 2014. The Chicago Tribune review mentioned, “Myers has proved herself a winning performer, boasting a brilliantly unstudied comic touch.” Her interdisciplinary dance works have been presented in South Korea, Germany, NYC, and throughout the Midwest.

Donika Kelly
Donika Kelly is an Assistant Professor of English specializing in contemporary American literature, poetry writing, and gender studies. She is the author of the chapbook Aviarium, published with fivehundred places in 2017, and the collections Bestiary (Graywolf Press 2016) and The Renunciations (Graywolf Press, 2021).

Bestiary won the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for poetry, and the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, was long listed for the National Book Award in 2016, and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and a Publishing Triangle Award in 2017.

Donika earned her MFA in Writing from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas-Austin and a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University. She is a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, the recipient of a Lannan Residency fellowship, and a fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Paris Review, Foglifter, and The New Yorker among other journals and magazines.