 She is a poet and an artist exploring intimacy, intertextuality, effect, and endurance, the performance, video works, and hand-woven textiles. Please welcome Indira Allegra. First one is called Body of Work. I want my winged pads to hang, brimming with crimson along Rothko's cubed color fields, red to the edges with universal themes. I want my untitled compositions to be properly lighted alongside Pollock's lavender ejaculations for ticketed publics to consider the monumental scale of pure menstrual gesture. I want the verticality of my blood on this maxi to drip before Newman's carmine stroke for my cotton canvases to be curated with stills monochromatic works suggesting the growth of seeds beyond their ochre. I want my monthly improvisations to spread into compositions that stain the boundaries of the frame, painting unapologetically expressionist works for museum patrons to ring their diamond knuckles over. I want to break from form into endometrial environments measuring the length of my career in unfertilized eggs, sinking like sable brushes into pigments I have created myself from linseed oil and progesterone. I want the proliferation of my ovum to let the color tell it, to outpace the generation of Motherwell's testicular aesthetics while art students marvel at the abstract accomplishment of my red slit. Mother's blues. Your uncle Butch never talked to me, but when mama asked him to check on the house the night she was working, he pulled out a fresh pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, smacking the bottom while toe healing his shoes off one after the other. I used to hate that. He never asked me if he could sit there rubbing his smoke from the new ports into my bedside chair. I used to love that chair. It was the nicest thing mama ever got for me. Wooden armrests in pink with those tiny red dots pressed into the upholstery used to look like sweet little apples to me. Butch never asked if I needed his shit talk from the garbage plant following up my cushion late too. Late at night when mama's away caring for someone else's babies, I'd hear the screen door open. That's an awful sound, Deira. Like a child crying softly on her hinges and then the keys in the door and his footsteps up the stairs to my room. You need to know your uncle Butch never asked me. Nothing. He'd say how hard it was for a working class man to be respected and push that awful smoke through his wide nose outside my bedroom window. Used to say how I was old enough to learn how to respect a man and then ash onto the roof of the porch below. He never asked me nothing. I never asked for nothing. Your gammy never really understood that. You've been with a man yet, Deira. You don't have to tell me it hurts the first time, don't it? Hurts so bad it feels like there's no room for two people in it. Just one big pain pressed up against the underside of your throat, keeping you from crying out like you wanna. I never said nothing. My blood came down that June he visited me. Your gammy left me a box of codex on my bedside chair early one morning before I headed out the house. She had taped a note, said, is the pain we inherit from the sin of Eve? In perfect blue cursive like the old folks like to do. Seemed like I was raised more by those notes than by the woman who wrote them. What I never understood though was how an apple dropped before the birth of Christ made me responsible for all that suffering, delivery. Take a... Ali jammed her left palm into the horn until her elbow was stiff. The sun burnt knuckles of her right fist wrapped the wheel, squeezing pink tendons up the back of her hand. She swerved left on the turn, tipping 2000 pounds of yellow Penske truck across the crumbling dashes of the two lane highway. I gasped. My right hip lifted off the seat. Can't you see? Ali's laughter broke. Crow's feet shattered across the width of her sunspotted face. Didn't know this old truck still had it in her. This bitch will turn on a dime if you ask her to. Holy shit, that was good. She was grinning at the open road ahead, sounding her horn out into the snow-covered hills surrounding us. There hadn't been another car with us on Highway 4 for over an hour. Lake Tahoe was still another 50 miles west and she wasn't gonna stop for gas again. Not after she caught me trying to call the police at the last gas station outside of Stockton. She'd come up from behind, ripped the phone out my hand and reminded me that unless I got my ass back into the truck she would spend down the grand in cash I was owed upon arrival in Tahoe. Ali made quick work of my phone with her steel-toed boot saying, it's not kidnapping if you know where you're going, stupid. I turned away from her to see the heat rising off the hood of the truck. Take my lips, I need to lose them. Take my arms, oh no. First it was five packages in San Diego. Then 12 to load in Los Angeles, another in Oakland and three more containers in Stockton before catching Highway 4 to go inland. Each time she'd tell me to remain in the passenger seat and watch for anyone who might be approaching the back of the truck too closely. She would slam the door, clipping the truck's keys to her belt before disappearing into an alleyway, a warehouse, sometimes a dimly lit apartment building for hours. I'd sing to myself to pass the time. Terrified to leave the plastic cab of the Penske for the isolated street she had taken me to I hadn't felt the comfort of a bed in days. As we'd been moving northward continuously when I did not out, the rumble of the truck's cargo door would wake me. Y'all goodbye, left me with eyes that cried. How can I go on deal with old. Allie kept her hair short, her nails shorter and wore a regular uniform of T-shirts and Levi's throughout the year. She spoke bitterly of male co-workers at the construction company. She'd spent two dozen years bent over from their jeering, welding the most dangerous beams for Edmond & Sons. Allie had been a year away from collecting retirement when the scaffolding beneath her began to tremble one afternoon. First there were sparks, then the screech of cut steel followed by the terrible twist of the scaffold away from the building. No one else had been with her on the beam that day. Nothing like it had ever happened in the history of the company. When her body turned up at the hospital the doctors had been shocked to find a woman underneath the welding helmet. You took the best, so what. No one had bothered to phone her latest lover, my mother, about the accident. Things have been hard for them financially. After the fall, but Allie had big ideas and though I didn't have a driver's permit yet she talked me into coming down to California to keep her company on some personal business. As her stepdaughter, she'd promised me $1,000 if all went well and I kept watch over some precious cargo. Baby. Allie turned the stereo up before I dissent into Tahoe. She leaned forward into the wheel now gassing the engine chinned down at 90 miles an hour. Whatcha gonna do with all that money kiddo? I looked down at my purse that she had emptied of my wallet and keys after I told her that I didn't wanna ride with her further than Stockton. Allie inched the stereo up again. Billie Holiday wailed against the windshield. Can't even drive yet, can ya? Allie taunted. And that's when I saw the vial. Hidden under her right hand, pressed between her first and second fingers in the wheel, she dipped her chin down slightly and bringing her nostril against the lip of the glass and inhaled some of the powder inside. Snow-capped pine streaked past the driver's side window behind her. I pressed my hands into the dashboard nauseous. The nose of the truck turned down, sending the cargo in the back forward with a thud. She shifted the penski into fifth. Mind your fucking business, kid. This delivery's arriving on time. Thank you. I'm here, I thank you so much. I think it's right in about periods. I just feel like there needs to be a lot more literature about periods.