✨ Visual Poetry
Undressing the Silence
In the hour before the performance,
silence has a texture—
velvet heavy, pressing against skin
like the weight of unworn costumes.
I photograph this quiet:
the empty chair facing the mirror,
the single lightbulb burning yellow,
the dress hanging like a question
waiting to be answered.
What the camera sees:
a room. A body. The space between.
What the camera doesn't see:
the held breath before transformation,
the moment when I am neither
who I was when I entered
nor who I'll be when I leave.
In this threshold space,
I undress the silence
layer by layer—
first the noise of the outside world,
then the chatter of expectation,
then the whisper of doubt,
until what remains is only
the sound of my own heartbeat
and the rustle of fabric
as I slip into becoming.
The mirror watches, patient.
It has seen this ritual before—
this shedding, this emerging,
this quiet violence of change.
I raise the camera one last time
and capture what cannot be captured:
the exact moment when
I stop performing for the lens
and start performing for myself,
when the silence breaks open
and I step through
into sound, into light,
into the person I've been rehearsing
to become.
About the Poet
Yuki Nakamura is a Japanese-American poet and photographer whose work explores the intersection of visual art and language. Their multimedia pieces have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and featured in journals including The Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, and Tin House. They are the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. "Undressing the Silence" is part of their ongoing project, Threshold Spaces, which documents the intimate moments of preparation and transformation in performance spaces. Yuki holds an MFA from CalArts and currently teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute.