Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a community performance artist, and a Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She also teaches on the Low-Residency MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College, is the Artistic Director of an international disability performance collective, The Olimpias, and has led horror, dark fantasy, and poetry writing circles in Wales and the US since the 1990s.
Petra uses somatic and speculative writing as well as performance practice to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. She has written academic books on disability arts and culture, medicine and performance, and community performance. Her book of speculative short stories, Ice Bar, is forthcoming in 2018. She lives with her partner, poet and dancer Stephanie Heit, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where they co-create Turtle Disco, a community arts space.
Website: www.petrakuppersfiction.wordpress.com
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Green Orion Woman Morning Song
Dawn helps wildlife. Soap me pretty, my dear, says
Green Orion Woman, waits for the No. 5 bus to Ypsi, co-op bag
folded behind her ear. The rosy tender jabs stigmata into her
boots, big round holes through which the orb releases ether.
The lyrics, the songs. All around her, fellow bus mates bop
into white lines, cable oceanic deep, blue cosmos
syncing into ear anvils. This is the forge, here they will rise,
tomorrow. Green Orion Woman prays, clean up the Detroit act.
Scrub the Bloomfield gutter and erase that silly smile. Drive over
township line. Salt crystals combine in slush beds, at night,
urban coyote sleek and thin moves ghost barricade,
alchemy familiar to Green Orion Woman and her need for fuel.