The Year in Review Through Prose Poetry

Dying to a Beat (Dance Central 2)

The competition was not so much between the two dancers as they wriggled and writhed in front of the camera, the literal eye of judgment, but between the dancers’ arms, legs, and torsos, between their sedentary habits and their ambitions toward movement and grace, toward rhythm and a sense of cool only a highly controlled and articulate body can muster. These people were not cool. Anybody watching through the window would have thought them in the throws of a heart attack or the kind of embolism that keeps the victim upright and twitching rather than prostrate and stiff. In other words, they looked like they were dying. Dying to a damn good beat.