Registration for our January 8-13 2024 Write Together session is in full swing. I’d love to see you in this one hour, twice-daily workshop in which we all quietly write together from a guided prompt. It’s a beautiful way to usher in the new year. 

I love going to weddings and I love dancing at weddings. I love how every wedding band plays the exact same songs and I love them all. I love how even when you’ve been dancing for hours and you could use a break and a drink so you step off the dance floor but then you hear the first few bars of Shut Up and Dance or Uptown Funk or Dancing Queen or Proud Mary and you look around at your friends and everyone’s got the Oh my God we can’t stop now! look on their faces and back out onto the dance floor you go. I love how there’s no skill or art to my dancing but who cares? Balterers of the world, unite!

Balter, by Keith Leonard

There is a word in middle English
to describe the way you dance—
with delight but without a hint
of art or skill. Al Green licks the walls
of our tiny apartment, and you balter
across the living room nursing the plants.
You balter to the sink
and sing to a toothbrush
with a mouth full of foam.
If we’re doing this right,
the ruling god of embarrassment
has no place in our home.
He can orbit the building.
He can scratch the brick
with nails as sharp as checkmarks,
but we do not need to invite him in.
I have never understood elegance.
Below the song dampening dirt,
the dead all practice a statued grace.
But here you can clap a half-step
behind the beat. You can announce
an extra note with the body abundant.
Here, you can place your hands
on my shoulders. I can lift my hands
to your waist.

Balter was first published in The Journal. Click here for more information about poet Keith Leonard.
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