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

#tiohtiàke #surfaces #holdings #queerness #fragments

the bass hit and my body answered.

not for them. not for the judges.

for the boy who ran. for the silence that stayed. for the part of me that never left the floor.

i looked up. the room cracked open. they saw it.

i was exactly where i needed to be.

#tiohtiàke #drift #fragments #holdings #queerness #blackness #refusals

intermission. outside the ball. boots up. talk moving. nothing profound. just enough to reset before stepping back in.

#tiohtiàke #drift #blackness #queerness #holdings #fragments

me and mother phoenix. mid-show, mid-shift, but nothing uncertain.

the name had already settled. this was the exhale. not just a mother— my friend, my people, my kin.

some moments don’t need a mic. just light, sweat, knowing.

#tiohtiàke #drift #holdings #blackness #queerness #fragments #refusals

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

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.

#tiohtiàke #drift #walks #queerness #blackness #holdings

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.

#tiohtiàke #queerness #blackness #surfaces #holdings

after the rain, the colours feel staged. the village waits to be repopulated. someone forgot their joy on a wet bench.

#tiohtiàke #surfaces #traces #queerness

accountability, laughter, cucumbers on the table. ballroom business, mid-afternoon.

#tiohtiàke #holdings #queerness #blackness #traces

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