The Men Still Sit With Their Songbirds
Mauriah has asymmetrical green bangs, buy viagra
but you can’t see them too well
in the shady nighttime of Blu.
She orders a moscow mule and tells me
that she felt really safe when she lived in Taiwan.
Sure, scooters and bicycles got stolen
but even then the thieves were only borrowing,
what was yours got returned to you.
“I was really lucky to go then
because it is changing so fast, viagra
they just want west,
western influence
so the traditional way of life is just
d i s a p p e a r i n g
for example:
the older women still get up,
do their chi gong
and their exercise in the park
at 5a.m. they rise
and they do that,
and you know the men
still sit with their songbirds
in cages and play checkers
in the park all afternoon, online
but I feel like that’s the last
generation that’s going to choose
to be in touch with those sorts of things.”
Mauriah has lived in multiple Asian countries
beginning with the letter ‘T.’
“After ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ came out
I was living in Thailand
and we’d be going up north
and then down to the islands
and you could tell
all the women
of a certain age bracket
who had really been influenced
by ‘Eat, Love, Pray’
and they were traveling
through Thailand
a lot of them would have their books
but you could just tell
that they were like
on this like
self-discovery journey
and you’re like
…”
Mauriah ends her sentence by making a face,
it is a amalgamation of pity, disgust and
wry smile acknowledging all the struggling of humanity.
Mauriah’s vocation?
“I make dances.”
Her verb makes confusion
to those who are trying to grasp her
for the first time,
they want to know,
does making dance mean you are a choreographer
or just a dancer?
Perhaps it means anything,
arranging and rearranging
her body and of the bodies
maybe of her students
since starting next week she will sub
a modern dance class at the University of Milwaukee.
Mauriah is the pioneer
for her three younger siblings.
“All of my brothers are athletes
(and my sister, a six foot tall twenty-two year old who plays basketball for a women’s Green Bay team.)
and they started to get to
like Warrior and the Spartan racing
They’re both now nationally ranked
and sponsored by Reebok
and they don’t work
so all they do
is they live at home with my parents,
they train,
and every weekend they go to a different race
and they race for money
and they win.
Like my brother just won the one
at Miller Park last weekend.
It’s becoming a new sport
where there’s obstacles,
they run sometimes just a couple meters
or sometimes two or three miles
and then the tougher courses are in the mountains
or in a really hilly environment
so they’re climbing up and down ravines,
one obstacle a couple weeks ago
was two eighty pound bags of stones
slung over their shoulders and like up a mountain.
It sounds terrible!
And then they’ll have to do like these
monkey bar climbs
but its usually after
they’ve been in a cold, wet water sort of thing
so that they can’t grip onto the monkey bars,
just ridiculous things!”
Mauriah’s dad was a football player for the Bears,
her mom was a high jumper.
Mauriah negotiates
earning a living as a dancer.
Does she ever think about going after the career of her brothers?
“I don’t want to do that, it just sounds terrible.
The girls are just like BEASTS
and they’re extraordinary,
but I just have no desire.”