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
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.
#tiohtiàke #drift #traces #surfaces #fragments #blackness #refusals
they painted it red. no signature. no spectacle. just a fact on a wall most people won’t read. someone bikes past. life goes on. or doesn’t.
steel and glass above me.
heat on the thighs.
watermelon trunks,
black towers,
a view that costs too much.
but i’m here anyway.
resting in the contradiction.
#tiohtiàke #drift #surfaces #blackness #fragments #holdings #refusals
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
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.
l’art existe. tucked between brutalist lines and fluorescent shadows. not a declaration— a reminder. of what survives the structure. of what glows anyway. even in institutions. especially in ruins.
#tiohtiàke #drift #traces #surfaces #refusals #fragments #holdings