Stasia Ward Kehoe Quotes & Sayings

Let's give our slave a big dream. A big future. — Stasia Ward Kehoe

Life is a big story. Music is just one way to tell it, to realize how many tales all kinds of people share. — Stasia Ward Kehoe

I calculate the breadth of Steven's shoulders, now wider than mine;
watch him tear open the Blokus game he likes to play with me after school;
count the hours between now and Dad coming home to take over
and I am only a little afraid
of the night. — Stasia Ward Kehoe

Thank God there are places
with sounds that make me cry
from beauty,
not from pain. — Stasia Ward Kehoe

Now, the edges of these memories sharpen.
I see the cracks in the studio floor beneath her feet,
The lack of turnout in her fifth position. — Stasia Ward Kehoe

Wish my life were inside a book
So I could turn to the ending,
See if it is a love story
Or a gothic disaster. — Stasia Ward Kehoe

I am pretty sure the myth of me
Is better than the reality. — Stasia Ward Kehoe

The dusty library air is electric with secrets/ almost palpable in the thick quiet that bounces between/ Cal and those books and me — Stasia Ward Kehoe

What was true and solid begins to slide, dissolve.
Your thoughts unravel faster than a satin ribbon
Whose edge hasn't been burned
Until you sit amidst a tangle of limp, pink threads,
Unable to reason
At all. — Stasia Ward Kehoe

Dare I tell them that since I came here to dance
I have been giving pieces of my body away
To ridiculous diets,
To repeated injuries,
To Remington?
And that maybe
I think
With each bit of my body
I lose a little piece of my soul — Stasia Ward Kehoe

Am I lonelier now
Than when my sad imagination
Had him disappear?
Heart torn,
Loosing tiny droplets
Of sorrow
No tape can measure
No needle can mend. — Stasia Ward Kehoe

It is strange to hear my words
Read back to me.
I don't think I wrote them
To have them ever leave the page.
I think I only write
What happens across my brain
When my feet are too weary
To dance anymore. — Stasia Ward Kehoe

I hover over myself
Watching.
Mind and body separated,
Each in control
As though there are two puppeteers
Working the strings of my marionette self. — Stasia Ward Kehoe

I wish I could concentrate on dancing
Instead of spending so much time pretending
I am still in junior high
But with Rem, I want to be sixteen
Or, like Alice in Wonderland,
Sometimes smaller,
Sometimes bigger still. — Stasia Ward Kehoe

Maybe he, like me,
is engaged in the kind of unspoken rebellion
you don't want to perform too brightly
since you're never certain
anyone in your family will notice
your darkened eyes, skeleton shoes, tousled hair,
patchy attendance record.
You may be sacrificing body and soul
on a ghostly battlefield, fighting across a divide
seen by no one
but you. — Stasia Ward Kehoe

Her body disappears like my voice
When I look too closely in the mirror
Without the pages of a notebook, a pen
To save me. — Stasia Ward Kehoe

Does it matter that people and things
Have words,
Have names?
If not,
Why read any book?
A litany of useless letters
Detached from bone, muscle.
Or are words the only things that make the muscle, bone, memory, movement,
Person
Real? — Stasia Ward Kehoe

Four laughs vibrate in harmony,
Warm
Delicious
Real. — Stasia Ward Kehoe

Do I dare ask him for what I want,
As if I knew it,
Could find it on some page
In some chapter
In some book? — Stasia Ward Kehoe

It seems to me that every day
Is an audition. — Stasia Ward Kehoe

I play the music of Steven
for Steven;
ragged, helpless,
it owns me, enveloping me
with an incomprehensible love - — Stasia Ward Kehoe

There are more guys than girls in jazz.
Next-to-no lady trumpeters
(oh, there are a few)
but it doesn't matter because, for me, jazz trumpet is all about one guy
Miles Davis.
He made this famous album in 1959
called Kind of Blue
which is kind of, always,
how I feel.
That album gets into your bones
goes and goes
starts, hesitates, reaches out, feels
for the music, the sound, the thing you want to change.
Always grasping for the unattainable makes you
kind of excited,
kind of sorry. — Stasia Ward Kehoe

The tips of my overgrown bangs
dip into the wet of my tears.
My fingers, forehead, moisten with sweat.
I fight the slipperiness, press the valves firmly,
play the love, the hate,
the misery, the hope,
the freedom that I wanted, never wanted, can't have;
that doesn't exist. — Stasia Ward Kehoe

I feel his arm
Lightly
Over me.
He takes one of my outstretched hands.
Draws it beneath my stomach.
"One more time ... "
This is not sex,
Not friendship.
Something
Strange
Special
In the stillness of his breath,
The waterlike way he moves.
He is making a dance.
We are making a dance. — Stasia Ward Kehoe

Are we alike
In that in-betweenness?
Can he see,
When I smile my blue eyes back
At his brown ones,
The country-city-woman-girl
Dancer, student
Bewildered
Unbelonging
Yearning? — Stasia Ward Kehoe

I've a long time trying to love
a brother whose only way of touching me is pain.
A long time escaping into music.
Practice, lessons, rehearsals that protect me
from the hurting parts of life.
I've been winning awards, applause,
acclaim for my trumpets since I was in grade school.
But love?
The word catches in my throat.
Do I love anything?
Have i forgotten how? — Stasia Ward Kehoe

Is truth here
In the ugly unseemliness?
The graceless moments
Before and after
Eyes are watching?
In the unballerina
The unperformed? — Stasia Ward Kehoe