On stage, she performed salt. She parched
her audience, their faces she sucked into them-

selves, faces becoming removals of faces,
reductions of faces, faces minus.

Ixet performed salt and kept a mental
notebook: she listed eyes bulging, puckering

lips, craters of cheek, eventually total
liplessness. She catalogued teeth as they

were revealed--canine and front, over and
underbites. Most teeth did not meet

the way she had expected. Ixet noted this
as she was becoming, molecularly, salt.

She extracted, from those who had paid
to see her, their water, and found dessication

endlessly various and boring. The skeletal
reactions to her work felt vaguely critical. Salt

did not lend itself to empathetic response nor
to community. Ixet had studiously investigated

salt's history, yes, but to what fact had she
tethered her imagination? She knew : salt

is a corrosive. As the flesh around her
withered, she became dilute, less there

on the stage, more present in the humid
air. By taking she was lost to theater, lost

inside theater. But salt took heart--the bodies
of her audience would last and last. Here was

the jerky of her mistaken poetics, the Jesus.