Littoral

you pulled me back in before i’d even stood all the way up hand in my hair mouth still wet your breath catching like you were trying to apologize with your hips

i didn’t say a word just slid down again let my knees hit the floor didn’t care if it hurt— not when your thighs were already shaking

you tasted like skin and sweat like the first tear into a mango’s flesh juice running before i could swallow and when you moaned— low, throat-closed, helpless— i knew you’d let me ruin you again

after we stayed still your breath warm against my cheek hands heavy on my shoulders before you kissed my fingers one by one like they were the ones that had started it

i did not leave quietly i left with the sound of a door unhinging

i counted nothing but the ways you built your survival from my exhaustion

you drank deep from the river i guarded until my hands split open from holding it wide

some hungers are teeth wearing the mask of open hands some silences are cages you only recognize once you’re free

i stay near to my voice even when it cuts and this time it cut us clean apart

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you pressed me into shapes that were never mine to bear

folded my edges inward misnamed it peace

you poured your weight into the hollow of my back wrenched the breath from my ribs

you built a roof from my shoulders and lived beneath it while the beams split

the spine remembers every bend, every break

one day it stands— the rafters tremble— and never returns

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i do not live in the shadow of what split me

i plant vertebrae like fence posts, pressing them into damp soil until the earth smells of rain and iron and answers to my name

my ribs curve open to the sky without permission

i let the wind thread my lungs and call it prayer i drink from the river and call it my own name

i keep the roof light— only what my shoulders welcome— and bones are not cages when you build them to breathe, when light pours through their windows

i became a scholar of grief by accident. because if i hadn’t, the grief might have swallowed me whole. because if i hadn’t, whiteness would have come for it turned it into content stripped it of meaning sold it as proof of progress.

because if i hadn’t, my pain—my hurt—my refusal to be pitied would have disappeared into silence. would have been lost to the archive or worse, used to build it.

i became a scholar of grief to protect what cannot be replicated. to honour what we carry. And i will not let them take that too.

found on a walking sign, half peeled, half legible. housing crisis? deport muslims. unclear if it’s fascism or mockery. as if that distinction ever mattered. the horror isn’t the message — it’s that it blends in. nothing shocks. just one more trace in a city that trades blame for shelter, displacement for safety, violence for policy.

got taller, this building. more glass. more echo. they call it growth. we remembered something else.

july 2018— after slāv, after kanata, after another season of voices stolen, then staged. we gathered here. we named what they wouldn’t. not just as protest. as refusal.

they built around it. more lights, more money, no redress. just steel stacked over silence.

and now that silver figure, blue-faced sentinel watching nothing. a monument to forgetting hollow as every apology we never heard.

but we carry the crack in the concrete. we remember because they designed it so we wouldn’t.

rigs still hanging. the crowd’s gone. just light, angles, and someone wrapping cables in the distance. no urgency. just the slow undoing of what passed through.

for one of my best ones. the candles held. so did we. strawberries, sugar, a whole lot of light.

not a performance of joy— the real thing. held in the breath, shared in the room.

this is how we stay.

a march of mourning. they carry the names in cloth, the weight of what has been done. downtown tries to pretend it’s still normal. but we are past normal. this is not protest. this is a procession for the dead.

on the way to a house practice. air heavy with smoke, with memory, with movement. we laughed anyway. pointed. posed.

played around with a new category—something shifted. in the body. in the breath. family feels like that sometimes: silly and sacred at once.

they call it wisdom but it reads like distance.

pages upon pages to say: perhaps you are real but not yet certain. perhaps you belong but only if it doesn’t make others uncomfortable.

they write of tension like it’s an external thing. they measure discomfort but not whose it is.

they gather everything but us.

no affected voice in the room, no hand in the margins, no breath in the footnotes.

somewhere, a child tries to speak and finds their name missing from the glossary.