First Kiss / Last Dance by Legacy Russell

Here’s how the dream ends:

It is Summer. Moisture is crucified in the air with two wooden clothespins and a wire hanger.

You are told there are trees in the city but everywhere you look you cannot see them and so you will all get into your little cars and drive up to the woods. In the woods there is a box. The box is a present already undressed. Climb in.

Inside you will hold your sweetie tight and tell her not to fear the Fall. You know everything will be dead by Winter, curdled and caked into coffins of frost and dirt: you will lie anyway and tell her not to fear the Fall.

Inside you sit by bodega-bought candle light and in this upside down Looking-Glass you’re Alice and acigarette smokes you, wrapped in rolling papers like five-hundred thread count Egyptian sheets. When lips meet you will realize you have just pressed the stars of embers into your own skin. The scar will be acrescent moon.

Sometimes it is light inside the box. Sometimes it is dark inside the box. Some things will stick because they have to; other things will fall off. Those things you will leave behind. You will not miss them.

Goodbye, Summer. Spring, we are stuck on your station, you are the porn for when the dancehall goes quiet and the dream —

Legacy Russell is an East Village born­-and-­bred writer, artist, curator, and creative producer. Residing in New York City, she has worked at and produced programs for The Bruce High Quality Foundation, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art; in 2010 she was granted a six­-month Curatorial Fellowship with CREATIVE TIME. Legacy is an alumni of ICI’s Curatorial Intensive, Curating in the Public Realm; her project, OPEN CEREMONY, explores ritual and ceremony as public sculpture in the East Village and Lower East Side. Legacy is the Co-­Founder of online journal and project space ContactProject.net (CONTACT) and a founding member of the creative collaborative Limited Time Only (founded 2012). In September of 2011 she was appointed as Art Editor of BOMB Magazine’s renowned online journal, BOMBlog. She has had work featured in a myriad of printed and online publications alike—Refinery29, the Village Voice, the New York Times, the Santa Fe Literary Journal, Guernica, the online theological journal Killing The Buddha, and more. Her creative and academic work explores mourning, remembrance, iconography, and idolatry within the public realm.