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.
i didn’t walk.
i sat in the first row, just close enough to feel the beat in my chest.
the floor glowed — not metaphorically, but actually.
light from above, sharp and circular, caught on the sweat of someone’s shoulder mid-dip.
it stayed there longer than expected.
people were yelling. not words, just recognition.
you know the sound.
when a move is too precise, too smooth, too honest to be ignored.
someone hit the floor and bounced back like they never touched it.
a house name echoed.
as legend. as fact. as affirmation.
i watched.
not from a distance, but from a place that knew how close it all is to disappearing.
how fast the lights go down.
how quickly the archive forgets us.
a phone beside me was shaking: someone filming, their hands unable to stay still.
the dj looped a beat that rose from under the floor, not over it.
and in that moment, nothing was held back.
i wasn’t walking.
but i was inside it.
inside the noise, the heat, the charge.
inside the circle of people screaming each other into aliveness.
and that’s the thing.
this isn’t spectacle.
it’s communion.
it’s how we stay legible to each other.
in the light of our own making.
again.
in the light of our own making.
again.
until the lights cut,
until the floor clears,
until the next time.
stood there teaching, not to perform,
but to remember.
to speak of what refuses extraction.
to name what pulses under erasure.
black keffiyeh against the chest,
kiki futures on the screen.
the room knew.
not everything had to be said.
some things shimmered between us.
they still whisper her name like it’s dangerous.
but this isn’t a whisper.
it’s a scream, wheatpasted to brick.
marie-josèphe angélique—enslaved, accused, executed.
not for a crime,
but for refusing to live quietly in a world built to crush her.
je me souviens, they say.
but they don’t mean her.
they mean the colony.
they mean the order she tried to set fire to.
this paper will peel, fade, dissolve into dust.
but she was never paper.
she was kindling.
and we’re still burning.