This Wound Is a World

. . . if i am somehow, miraculously, bodied then/ my skin is a collage of meditations on love and shattered selves.

in the dark, none of us have names and no one is sacred

Poetry is creaturely. It resists categorical capture. It is a shape-shifting, defiant force in the world. Indeed, it runs counter to the world.

love is the clumsy name we give to a body spilling outside itself.

he was native too so i slept with him. i wanted to taste a history of violence caught in the roof of his mouth. i wanted our saliva to mix and create new bacterial ecologies: contagions that could infect the trauma away. i wanted to smell his ancestors in his armpits: the aroma of their decaying flesh, how they refuse to wilt into nothingness. i wanted to touch his brown skin to create a new kind of friction capacious enough for other worlds to emerge in our colliding. i wanted our tongues to sketch a different tomorrow: one in which we might know how to love better, again. i wanted him to fuck me, so i could finally begin to heal.

do we have a word to make sense of this kind of loss: a body feeling like it doesn’t belong to you anymore? sometimes the act of enduring itself becomes too much to bear and you forget how to go on in a world that didn’t want you in the first place. how do you mourn something you can still see in the mirror?

my okcupid username was nakinisowin which in cree means: resistance means: not white means: love don’t live here means: ask me what my “ethnicity” is and say that’s interesting when i tell you i’m native that i am the monster in the closet your bedtime stories prepared you for you want a man whose body doesn’t whisper horror stories each time you touch him a man whose nightmares are about dying because he doesn’t already know what that feels like but then i messaged mrB0B because his skin was brown like the water that drags itself through my reserve pleading: drink me i need you i promise and his profile was a eulogy of sorts he was still in mourning refusing to let go of a body which never belonged to him in the first place i said: hey to which he responded: be careful i am still healing from the white men who told me they loved me and my cree is broken like my body is and i don’t know how to tell the difference between love and trauma but i could try for you a native like me which is to say that to be native and queer is to sometimes forget how to love yourself because no one else wants to is to bandage the wounds with strangers you met an hour ago and count the number of times they baptize you with words like beautiful and handsome and sexy because sex is the only ceremony you have time for these days but this was different because time stops and is made anew when two native boys find each other’s bodies and write poems about it afterwards because each kiss was an act of defiance a kind of nation-building effort our bodies were protesting dancing in a circle to the beat of a different drum that was also a world in and of itself

sometimes not loving is the most radical thing you can do.

why did my love scare you? was it too dirt road? what would you have done with a dirt road anyways?

almost is the closest i can get to the sky.

The goal is not just to advocate for our right to be free but to insist on it, to demand it. The poem is the terrain for this unruly and differently ruled insistence.

I read and write poetry because it is a time and place to practice radical empathy. Poetry reminds us that there are worlds everywhere, in a gradation of states of flux, many of which are hanging in the balance.

when love looks into the rubble of heartbreak he sees his kookum standing there and he thinks about how she made old worlds feel livable again and about how those who died already never forget what it is to become and unbecome a body