“Society takes no responsibility for Black people’s poverty and their social exclusion and isolation, even though the history of our continuing mistreatment and subjection at the hands of that very same society is well-known; rather, our poverty and exclusion are offered as evidence of our inherent inferiority.” (Rinaldo Walcott, On Property, p. 40)
Archival records document the extraction, preservation, circulation, and material use of Black flesh within the operations of slavery and colonial regimes. Medical harvesting, the movement of skulls and bones, the retention of severed limbs as curiosities, the transformation of teeth and hair into usable materials, and the verified binding of human skin into objects illustrate a domain in which Black flesh functioned as materially available matter. These practices occurred without initiating legal proceedings, moral disquiet, or gestures toward repair, and they were enacted within scientific, domestic, and institutional settings as routine extensions of proprietary use. Black death did not necessitate ceremonial mourning or cultural restoration, and no ontological transformation was required for Black bodies to become usable. The continuous accessibility of Black flesh, in both biological life and physical death, affirms the claim that Blackness occupies a position exterior to the category of the Human. Within this structure, violence does not presuppose the negation of personhood, and material use does not signify the loss of human status, because neither recognition nor protection were present to be removed. This condition delineates a modality in which injury is not measured against human suffering and use is not constrained by the norms that govern the treatment of remains.
the ache that made me stay
i have never known love that didn’t leave a bruise somewhere, even if it was shaped like a palm pressed gently against the small of my back, reminding me to keep walking when the street went quiet and my name felt like a threat.
some nights, i mistake survival for a lover who texts back late but always says the right thing. some days, i wish i could forget how good it feels to be wanted for the sound of my grief.
my body has learned to breathe through closed doors, has called it kinship when someone remembers my name after i flinch.
let me be honest: i have built altars from the broken. lit candles where silence should have meant no. kissed ghosts goodbye and still invited them back in,
because sometimes i need a witness even if they can’t hold me.
don’t call me resilient. call me the scream that stayed in my throat until it fermented into a poem. call me the fire alarm no one pulled. call me the boy who kept showing up to the wrong kind of church, hoping someone might bless the parts of him still covered in ash.
i am not healing. i am making room for the possibility that i might one day not have to.
A Record of Burning and Continuing
When the train curved out of Jasper and the last trace of town dissolved into trees, the air shifted. The mountains widened. The sky opened. Burned slopes unfurled beside the train—charred trunks rising with a patient stillness. The valley floor stretched in long, unbroken lines, marked by fire and by gentler seasons. Light moved across the land in a slow, steady sweep.
My body answered.
There was a small moment—easy to miss—when the hum beneath the floorboards matched the rhythm of my breath. The seat vibrated lightly under my palms, and the world outside the window moved with the same calm I felt inside my chest. Not metaphorically. Physically. My nervous system eased into the pace of the land passing by.
I leaned into the window, letting the cold glass hold the weight of my forehead. A thin smear of dust along the frame caught the fading light. Outside, nothing rushed. The view revealed what was there: blackened trunks, ashen soil, new shoots pushing through what remained. A record of burning and continuing.
Something opened in me.
The land offered only its presence. No message. No direction. Just itself. In that grounded stillness, something inside loosened—some long-held habit of arranging meaning or shaping myself around what I encountered. Here, in a landscape carrying its own history, witnessing came easily.
Warmth gathered beneath my ribs, a shift without name. A tone inside the body, low and steady, carrying its own centre. My breath lengthened. Thoughts thinned. Sensation rose—what arrives when there is room for it to grow.
The land stretched in ridges and broad valleys, dark slopes striped with fire’s passage, small green clusters bright against the black. As I watched, something familiar moved through me—simple and felt, more tactile than thought. The upright trunks, weathered and scarred, held a presence that met me without demand.
A faint ache surfaced with that meeting. It moved with the slow rhythm of the train. The ache leaned toward relief—the relief of existing without tightening, without shaping myself for anything outside me. Moments of inhabiting myself fully gathered in that sensation.
I let the tenderness stay. It brought memories of times when breath caught high in my chest, when I tried to fold myself into places that offered no room. The grief in that memory rose and thinned, moving without overtaking. I looked again at the dark forms of trees that had been through fire and continued to stand.
As the land shifted in colour and form—snow-dusted slopes, river flats catching the last light—something in me grew sharper. My body’s signals—its pulls, its pauses—became unmistakable. They pointed, not toward interpretation, but toward a direction I could feel. With nothing pressing against them, they held their own certainty. The evening around me carried a kind of grounded recognition, a settling into what was already there.
Dusk pooled in the valley. The burned trunks blurred into silhouettes. A muted grace rested over everything—unforced, unadorned.
The longing inside me stretched out without urgency. It didn’t seek answers. It gestured—toward environments where breath spreads easily, where warmth rises without coaxing. Toward spaces shaped by sincerity. Toward a pace of living with room for breath and truth.
When the window darkened and my reflection merged with the last lines of the valley, I saw my face softened by the dim interior light. Something in me settled again. I felt held by an inner belonging that did not depend on the landscape that sparked it.
As the train carried me eastward, I stayed with that feeling. I let it anchor me. I let it remind me that steadiness is not given by destination or insight. It lives in the fact that my rhythm becomes audible when the world quiets enough to let it surface.
The land outside held its shape. And I held mine.