queer poets

animadi

No Escape

I don’t think people know the many and strange entangled reasons a young woman would get into the car to be whisked off into danger by a white man twice her age.

To talk to them on the internet.

There are things far more dangerous than any one man, life for one.

But then you look over and realize you might be left alone with him, and question if you are walking away from death or towards it.

Also, what about those of us without escape? Where home is a safe slow stumble and life is a basket of blanket stares, longing and fear?

We have parking lots. Not cottages. We had gravel and tim horton’s at 2 am.

We sat in our parents car for as long as possible just to be alone.

We took baths. We took showers. We slept.
We hid in our minds.
Secrets became refuge.

Always watched, but so unheard. A thousand bruises went unnoticed as your parents locked the door, closed the blinds, and turned off the light to keep you safe.

Then you become an adult, and anywhere could be a possibility, but you that cage of your youth feels like a tomb drawing in.

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animadi

Wishing for freedom

brutality on black bodies

Even a blue dust bathed bra soaked in the sweat of my sun soaked skin bites.
Bites into tender sides
Pinches soft parts
A wire to my lung
A sternum on fire with irritation
Bound 
I am bound.

Stuck in the illusion of safety – when the very things that cling to my sides could kill me at any moment
I must hide my breath and hold my heart…

A bright bird wings beating
Bashed in, time and time again
As the ways of the world claw into me.
Crack my rip cage open between the sobs that rack me
And grab grab grab my frightened bird
Always trying to dash her in the dirt.

Sometimes I think it would be easier to let her fly away.
I wish I too could join her.
Away from hands that pick
Bindings that poke
And the terror to breathe full breaths as I fly so free.

animadi

Coffee Island

Exposed brick faces me as I wait for words. I run my hands through hair that feels like summer grass and I chew my fingers

Each nail is stripped of its paint, bright and bitter
For a minute my mind drifts into a memory of spring berries bursting sour in my mouth.
I never could wait for summer to ripen.

I sit in the wooden forest of chained benches on coffee island.
Sitting over rocky pavement and surrounded by roaring concrete I remember the baby bird we nudged towards death.

We chipped away, peeling at the shell with hungry prying fingers, even as the chick lay shuddering and cowered from the light. Relentless in our need to complete the harm, forcing it to hatch faster than I could keep it alive.

The colour are even correct.
Greys of every shade and wood being transformed into ghostly boards at the appallingly slow pace of destruction this intersection of the suburbs and city can handle.

It is here I hide. Watching desperately interested in finding out about each person that walks by.
My cup hides me.
My phone hides me.
My drink hides me.
My gender presentation hides me.
Hides my gaze.
Maybe even something twisted that can feel like power in the shadows.

The chains on the bench at coffee island make a kind of wretched sense that is far too stark to give words to.

animadi

Sweating and Waiting

I rub your face with my sweat slick hands
Hands I sat on and rocked waiting for you to arrive.
Hands that were as cold as they were filled with anticipation.

My ass was cold through thin trousers made of cheap cotton sewed by small children.
Children with big eyes and brown skin.
Children that for a difference of a few years, looked just like me
I smelled my sweat and the cold wind hitting it just so that anyone who came near me would know … “Yes, winter sweat, that is what I am smelling.”
This intermingled with the rusty bench, cold and metal.
These scents existed in a loop my mind traveled across paying attention to each part in a sequence, over and over.

All while waiting.


Fluids fell out of me as I anticipated you.
Your feet stepping on concrete.
The feeling my eyes sent my hands as always imagining caressing your coat when I saw you before burying my hands diving past each layer.
I always sought skin.
I wanted to find where I could feel your life…pulsing and tell you with my fingertips how much I loved you.

I couldn’t with my mouth because it would scare us both but my hands could whisper truths to your spine.
I know your heart would hear.

For now, sweating and waiting.

animadi

Bursting Heart

A heart bursts open to reveal a tender moon that no chains can trap
nor hands can tuck away

No light and uncertainty to fall away from an ache that began with your being,
pressed into the backs of your eyelids
etched into bones

Desire demanding and breath revealing
through murky water that spills
into an ocean of ancestors tears

animadi

Tides and Teeth

Terror follows with tides and teeth
Relief is a crumbling in cracked hands
You cannot pray the ocean away
Alive or dead, the water will drown us
Down us
Deliver our bones
Bodies flayed
Bloated and betrayed
In water where there is none

animadi

Heatin’ Honey

Lean into my chest and let go.

Fat belly Bella laying it down, as I get up and pull you close.

Rewrite the rush and find your rhythm as it grows soft and warm

Sweet and sticky…

Do you remember the last time you melted, onto my mouth like the honey pooled at the bottom of my cup of tea?

Feet flutter in blankets, and hearts beat in chests.

Can’t butterflies get a minute to fall back and stop resisting?

Palms.
Hearts in gentle hands.

Blankets and sighs

Find me here.

animadi

Fight To Remember

When I kiss the colonizers tongue, blood fills my mouth.
I begin to drown.

My words leave me and I am filled with a mouth full of english
and a mind full of doubt.

When did my skin become foreign to my eyes in a sea of snow?
When did heat become uncomfortable?

A room lit so artificially bright that it beats me down with unremitting despair
I will not let these things make me forget.

animadi

Witch, always.

I was always the witch.
This is a word in a tongue that is not mine but will do.

I am terror when you make me the other, but if you stand with me I become possibility.

Find me in the woods, sharpening my axe, sewing my bags, and waiting.

Smell the blood. Lick the earth, and listen for my laugh.