I’m super excited to announce a strange and enchanting evening of songs and poems with Alabaster Rhumb!
I’ll be performing poems constructed from photographs and scents, set in sound. This verse lecture-in-progress grows out of my ongoing writing and research on blindness and photography, translated into language and the senses. The vocalist, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Zira CB will accompany my words set in a dynamic soundscape.
Alabaster will perform pieces from his illustrated songbook, How to Prepare Heart.
Get tickets HERE!
December 2nd, 7pm sharp!
At Under St. Mark’s Theater in a co-production with Frigid NYC.
94 St. Marks Place, NYC
Poster description
Elegant white italics announce “Hollow Bones & Found Poems: An evening with M. Leona Godin & Alabaster Rhumb,” on a cyanotype field featuring a nineteenth-century natural-history plate of a little owl (Athene noctua). Its silvery-white skeleton seems to dance while delicate bones scatter around it—wing, claw, and ring-like fragments suspended in deep, speckled blue. Wed., Dec. 2, 2026 · 7pm; UNDER St. Marks Theater. A QR code featuring the Frigid penguin is in the bottom right corner.
Our Athene noctua bones
The original plate for our poster comes from Adolf Bernhard Meyer’s Abbildungen von Vogel-Skeletten, two-volume set of photographic illustrations of bird skeletons published between 1879 and 1897. Our little owl, the Athene noctua, is plate no. 91.
Description: The image is a vertically oriented scientific photograph printed in dark brownish-black tones on warm, yellowed paper. It has generous blank margins and no decorative border. The little owl’s skeleton occupies the central portion, arranged in an almost dancing pose. Its disproportionately large skull faces left, with a short, sharply hooked beak and a huge circular eye socket. A small pale dot sits inside the dark eye cavity. The skull is attached to a curved neck that descends toward the compact rib cage. The rib cage is an intricate series of fine, curved bones resembling a little basket. One wing extends upward and to the right, its long bones forming a sharply bent triangle. The other wing is detached and floats to the lower left, with its long, slender bones folded together. The legs are also strangely arranged. One extends diagonally down and right from the body, ending in a foot with long, dramatically curved claws. Another detached foot appears beneath the torso, while a small circular bone, resembling a dark ring or washer, floats separately to the right. The overall effect is both clinical and uncanny.
*My previous scented-tactile lecture on photography was 100 Years of Blindness*
*Check in with Alabaster HERE*