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.
#tiohtiàke #drift #holdings #queerness #blackness #fragments #refusals
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. not just in the body. in the breath. family feels like that sometimes: silly and sacred at once.
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.
accountability, laughter, cucumbers on the table. ballroom business, mid-afternoon.
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.
#kjipuktuk #drift #blackness #queerness #refusals #fragments #holdings
capitalismo mata-nos. not on a banner. not in a book. just a trash bin, tagged on a side street in lisboa.
the message was already decaying, paint dripping down like it knew no one was coming to fix this.
i didn’t take it as warning. i took it as witness.
sometimes the clearest truths live where you’re not supposed to look.
naky held up a portrait like it was a mirror. virgínia quaresma— journalist, lesbian, afro-portuguese. forgotten by design. remembered anyway.
the tour wasn’t quiet. it moved. spoke back. refused the way history gets told without breath, without body.
the archive wasn’t in a museum. it was in his hands. in the cadence. in the way we stopped on cobblestones to make space for her name.
from up here, the city looks soft. terracotta roofs, blue sky, sun warming the stone.
but i know what these walls were built for. how far their reach once stretched. what was claimed from here. what was sent.
it’s beautiful. it’s brutal. it’s both.
sometimes the view is part of the violence.
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.
#tiohtiàke #refusals #traces #blackness #surfaces #fragments