MUSICAL GENTRIFICATION

the ______ woman has told the class her talking tot is now beat-boxing. she is 
delighted--about this occurrence. she is excited the way blonde hair meets mouth 
when spit happens. you listen like you heard something cool on the radio like your 
favorite version of a 70's song & then--you realize it's not that song at all. 2014 remix 
of ______. you want to be excited that she's excited that her tiny tot is a beat-boxing 
machine. you try. really hard. like the way you try hard to listen to _______ say they 
are going to go get dread locks. or go & chow down on some mexican. & you want to 
say (that sounds cannibalistic.) you want to be happy for your co-workers newfound 
beat-boxing happiness. & you ask her if she knows how it started or a beat-box artist & 
she says her daughter heard it from this really cool 15 year old kid in indiana who 
started to like it because he heard it from a really cool kid in michican who is 17. 
btabtabtabzbzbz she's trying to show you with her hand over her mouth & you 
honestly just want to say bless you. bless. you ___.




Anastacia Renee Tolbert is a queer super-shero of color moonlighting as a writer, performance artist and creative writing workshop facilitator. She has received awards and fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, VONA, Jacks Straw, Ragdale and Artist Trust. Anastacia Renee is 2015-16 writer-in-residence for the Richard Hugo House. and her chapbook 26, recently published by Dancing Girl Press, is an abbreviated alphabet expression of the lower and uppercase lives of women and girls. A Pushcart nominee (2015), her poetry, fiction & nonfiction have been published widely. Recently Tolbert has been expanding her creative repertoire into the field of visual art, and has exhibited her painting and photography surrounding the body as a polarized place of both the private and political. This year she has begun a yearlong theatrical mixed-media project in collaboration with the Project Room, 9 Ounces: A One Woman Show. Lately she’s been obsessed with the body & the stories (true & not true) it holds. http://indigoa.wix.com/2015