structural quiet
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
refusals
the wall says enough
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.
heat and contradiction
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
what already was
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
rooms like this
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
held against forgetting
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.
what grows anyway
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
careful language, violent ends
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.
still there
sometime in april
i haven’t been back to italian class. not really a decision—more like a slow unthreading.
at first i missed one, then two. a message half-drafted. a reminder snoozed. now it’s just a tab i don’t open.
i think of them sometimes, conjugating without me. the schwa still soft in my mouth. still mine, even if unused.
there was no rupture. no reason. just me, always a little too tired, a little too elsewhere. it’s not shame. not quite guilt either. just the shape of absence when you let it stay.
i’ve left so many places like this. no goodbye, no explanation. not because it didn’t matter, but because it did—and i couldn’t hold it all.
the leaving isn’t loud. it’s slow. partial. unfinished. like language. like me.