campfire on the superfund site
being in the grey. the specific weird of this time.
once upon a time, a decade and change and a few iterations of self ago, I moved into a very classic class of 2010 Oakland “majority QTBIPOC” (5 to 4) collective house, where I won the Oakland rent war by my rent for my shack-in-the-back being $175. all the power was through a heavy duty extension cord through a hole in the bottom of the wall, which fused with my space heater’s plug after a year of continual use. there was just enough room for a double sleigh bed, a desk already hammered into the wall and the dark cherry wood chest of drawers I still have that I bought from Thrift Town for fifty bucks in 2007.
some of the white working class queerpunx in the house were very into Hurray for the Riff Raff. the rest of us, the BIPOC ones, just went to Butta, Ships in the Night and Good Times (as one roommate said to me once, “Leah, you can hang out hella hard in Oakland, it can be all you ever do if you have good unemployment.”) so we were like, ok go have your white people bird patches on your hoodies folk punk. then Alynda started speaking more about being Puerto Rican from the Bronx and made The Navigator and I almost got “i’ve been a lonely girl, but I’m ready for the world” as a tattoo because, as a friend recently said, there is no limit unfortunately to the text tats a poet can get.
anyways- been playing this single on hyperfoc repeat the last week because “most of our old friends our dead/ time flies when you’re getting old/ i was born with a bb boy soul/ maybe one day i’ll see you again/ in a field, a war, a kingdom of sand” hits right now. along with “try to remember most everything thing.”
EDITED TO ADD: I was like, I think I missed the point of what I’m trying to add and it’s this- it also feels like a memory war right now. Like, I’m trying to hold on to memories that are very recent of what’s happening genocidily in Gaza. Like I’m trying to hold on to memories of early pandemic hope and just life, and going back, to memories like of that shack 13 years ago and what life tasted like at a different moment of freedom, to sustain me and not have it be erased by the endless grey.
hey you. how you be?
I have an eye infection and was like, it’s literally a film between me in the world. cedar oil and chickweed tincture were not cutting it all the way so i sought out western medicine. in the fastest telehealth appointment I have ever had (four minutes) the really nice, real tired nurse practitioner at penn medical asked me to pull my eyelid down and get real close to the screen. i’m doing that, taking my glasses off and shoving my eyeball an inch from the panoptic eye of my computer’s little green light camera, and she’s like- are you anemic? your conjunctivamis is really pale. go check it out with your pcp when you have a chance.
I had indeed been having the low down draggy feeling, but I assumed that it was, like, life. genocide month 5, my body saying what the fuck to 70 degrees wearing shorts outside two fridays ago and snow the next day. the tension of it being a week+ since we all have been waiting to see if 1.9 million people displaced into Rafah are going to be bombed into a final solution.
it’s going to be spring in a month and I find myself not looking forward to it, for the first time in my taurus spring baby bytch life. there’s something about so much uncertain vigil that makes grey feel right. long winter feels right.
collage of images of Cecilia Gentili by Hana Malia
a lot of people died the last couple weeks. rest in free cecilia gentili, catriona rueda esquibel and dee finley. Love to you if you were one of their folks or their life touched yours.
I listened to this audio of Cecilia’s funeral (start at 5:57) where Liaam Winslet and Oscar Diaz say, in St Patrick’s fucking Cathedral, the grand edifice of the Catholic murder state, to as Tuck Woodstock put it, “the screams and cheers of 1000 grieving transsexuals”:
click at 54:50 for this clip“Esta puta, esta granda puta.. La Santa Cecilia, madre de todas las putas. Hoy te decimos que hasta pronto, y que nos des la fuerza, el coraje, para continuar tu legado, para seguir con los retos que tenemos por delante, para mantenernos firmes. Porque sabemos lo que merecemos. Amor. La equidad. Los mismos derechos. Y una vida dignidad.”
“This whore. This GREAT WHORE!!!! Saint Cecilia, mother of all whores. Today we say, we see you soon, and that you will give us the strength, the courage, to continue your legacy, to continue the challenges ahead, to remain steadfast. Because we know what we deserve. Love. Equity. The same rights. And a life of dignity.”
(This needs to be on the side of a candle as a prayer soon, probs already is.)
This moment just feels like: The beloved mother of all whores. This femme who got the hormones for and bought lunch after every hard legal and medical appointment for so many people I love. Was a huge force for the fight for decriminalization of sex work in NY. Was unceasingly for Palestine, had just screamed Free Palestine at her 52nd birthday, biggest red heart. Dies.
And her loved ones hustle the cathedral to have her memorial. A thousand people are screaming CECILIA!!!!
An exorcism.
Talk about a culture war.
ps: you can donate to cecilia’s legacy fund here.
in the along in the grey: the question is as always, WHAT IS TO BE DONE, but like. we’re doing it. and we’re also in the grey doing it. it’s the grief grey. it’s four planets in pisces and aquarius transits. so much overwhelm emotion reality and shielding from it, in hiding or boundaries or both.
it’s the grey of year five of the pandemic hitting without much recognition, but still hitting. maybe you are like me, some variation of crip in what is now a covid conscious subculture, like punk, masking mouthwashing nose spraying and testing, going on year five of our apartment dwelling lives, if we are lucky enough to have them. we know we are lucky to be alive and able to figure out these condoms and bleach of the 2020s that allow us to be together, at least a little. yet, the five years of slow blood of being in our apartments with tv thickens in us.
a lot of people I know have been talking about what keeps us, including the shit that looks delusional to other people. one thing that has been keeping me is leaning into martiality. people think I’m joking when I say I think of myself as some kind of corporal of a raggedy ass army, but I’m kind of not. Owning that we really are in a war that’s getting hotter all the time is the metaphor/ container I choose. It helps shape my choices and disciplines, my experience of this war. If we’re in a war, I’m playing my position. Doing what I can with what I have.
Martiality is what helps me get up again. Tells me if I’m having a shitty day it’s just a shitty day, go to bed, sleep, wake up, make the bed, go outside, do my kettlebell rows and listen to my hip scar tissue pop. Figure out what I can do with what I have. Tina asked how I was doing okay the other week because everyone else lightweight has the SI, and besides different kinds of good love in my life, it’s this. The discipline and mental framework helps me keep taking limps forward.
And, it’s important to state, a cripped version of militancy and discipline undulates and shifts. It’s not steady the same every day, it’s not reveille at 6 AM or hospital corners on the bed or never being depressed and staring into the void. It’s waves of couch curlup grief hide weed, and waves of running around on secret missions. The two flow into each other in a loop. Are not separate. Some of those secret missions are astral projection from the inward couch.
There are many kinds of war happening right now as Bisan and others have said. Sniper war, hunger war, infectious disease war.
One of these wars is psyops. A lot of our brains broke in genocide a couple months ago, we have gone beyond processing what we cannot process and yet genocides continue and worsen. I believe this is deliberate, a continuation of a known tactic the Right uses, to overwhelm us, that they have been using in a concentrated form over the past seven years since the Trump election especially.
It’s not feeling like it did in November right now, where there was despair and grief and also a feeling of, millions of us are together in the streets, united in anger and witness, that alone is worthy and perhaps something will happen. So many Palestinian and SWANA friends have said to me since October 7: this is more mobilization for Palestinian liberation than we have seen in our lifetimes. And yet it’s still not stopping it. There can be sumud, the Palestinian resistance tradition of steadfast endurence in that space. And, the mindfuck of “we’ve been organizing or at an action every day for 2 months and contniually see the most devastating things ever in our phones, and it’s been five months and it’s not stopping” can also break the brain.
For a lot of my life I believed in the common organizing trope that many if not all people could be radicalized (in the old meaning of the word) through sharing truth, story. Through conversation. And also through pressure and consequence and demand and cost and shame. If they see it, they will wake up, was the argument. It’s not without utility. Last week I was at the protest of 8,000 people in Philly for Rafah that the media declined to report on. As me and my companion leaned against a hotel wall in Rittenhouse Square because it was cold and our hips hurt, I watched the faces of some of the people walking by blank and was like, it truly is the last battle between good and evil right now. These people are not moveable. If they haven’t moved in the past five months of children hanging from walls and eating leaves, they’re not going to.
Which goes along with something I heard a movement elder share last year- that she thought we should give up trying to make everyone be an abolitionist, it was impossible and a waste of time, we should focus on making 5-10% more of humanity be abolitionist. She argued that most changes in the history of the world were made by a minority of radical people, even when there was backlash.
Which goes along with something I’m sitting with and writing about in the new memoir I’m working on- what do we do as people who have been attempting to organize the transformative justice project of creating justice/safety that don’t depend on the state/ prisons/ cops, with that fact that some people choose and continue to choose evil. No matter how much love and community joy juice is offered. I’m writing about this in terms of some abusers I have encountered, but it’s also a bigger question on the world’s clock.
Finally, we’re in a surreality of being held waiting, in anticipation of what we can’t predict but dread. It’s hard to make plans, to prepare because all we know is all hell is breaking loose and about to break more loose. In the election of genocide joe versus trump versus “undeclared,” and in the overall sense of we cannot predict what is about to descend. Is it going to be nuclear was sponsored by AI or the world’s biggest deepfake election? Why not both?
PS: I don’t know if you’ll read all the way to the end of this. I was listening to the recent Gender Reveal episode where Tuck Woodstock interviewed Lucy Sante where amongst other things, they talk about how they both wrote for magazines during different heydays of periodical writing, and how nowadays there’s no word limits and people write way too long because they can. So, this may indeed be another long self indulgent substack that people will click on and not finish; I apologize. I’m in the grey with an eye infection writing through it. Some of what I try to do is a writer is documentation of the time we are upon. To potentially be helpful, and also just to write it the fuck down so it doesn’t get lost, and so maybe you can see some of what you might be experiencing reflected in these words. This felt worth it to put out bc it might serve that task, esp writing in a time that as Lucy also said, “doesn’t feel like a time of expansion, it feels like a time of duck and cover.”
some recent shit:
Cyree Jarelle Johnson and me did this instagram live that recorded about wtf doing divination work/ being a seer or a healer means in this moment, entitled “my practice will be political or it will be bullshit. it won’t embeddddd but please click the link above for some good captioned stuff.
alaska and me were talking and she said “I said to my friend, it was actually better when we were young. Not nostalgia. The economics of now are insane.” i was like yeah i miss my 20s, not out of nostalgia but because everything was fucking cheaper and it was so much easier as a working class/ no trust fund writer to make just enough money to live, pay $20-30 /week on groceries and be ok, and have a lot of time to be a working artist. writing takes time and space, that includes the time and space to write shit you rip up, including time and space to stare at a wall. starving us out from the spacetime to do the creative work as working class artists that might be what the imaginary needs right now is also deliberate. I wrote some tweets about it here.
A friend put together this list of resources on disability and Palestine.
Crips for eSims for Gaza continues to chug along and hit 200k USD in donations this week, after 7 weeks of it being up. It still blows my mind that we collectively did this, but there’s very few ways to get money into Gaza and people want to do something, so there it is. I continue to hope that people will use our creative mind to figure out what our handful or truckload of sand on the gears of empire is. Do what you can do. It doesn’t have to be “big” or legible, I sure didn’t think this would be “big.” Tend the creative crip crazy space of imagining what that is, whatever it is.
Also, as Alice said:
Image description: screenshot of a tweet by Alice Wong, @SFdirewolf: BTW: Crips for eSims for Gaza railed over $200k to purchase e Sims for Palestinians. 3 people, @thellpsx,
and me, unafilitated w/any org & w o any institutional support, made this happen thanks to the community.The Writing Freedom Fellowship, maybe? the first fellowship for writers who have been locked up, went live. Somebody I love and whose writing I love got one. Some of you might remember Stefani Echeverria-Fenn’s writing at Living Altars 2022, I follow her writing wherever it goes. I’m so glad she got this money, so glad everybody did. May there be more. May there be life after money.
Wrote some new poems:
in the grey
there’s a film over my eyes and I finally admit it’s pinkeye// literally there is a soft focus film between me and reality// i want to run seven miles a second but I can’t get off this couch// my apartment is tacky and filled with books at the end of the world//telehealth has four minutes for me, Alicia has tired kind eyes through the screen// can you pull down your lid and get really close?// I put my hazel eye next to the macbook pro’s blinking green panoptic, bataille and foucault could really do a number with this one // are you anemic?, your --- is really pale, check it out with your pcp// I did indeed have the low down draggy feeling but I thought it was continually taking six bullets to the chest//I have to “call really early” to get on the list to see a new pcp, it’s like getting in the club//we are all watchful waiting trying to see the numbers on the clock of the world, the numbers of the dead.
just before Rafah
Saturday night sitting on a city cliff
over the Schuylkill, watching dark water, a corporate tower
flashing 52 DEGREES, HAPPY BLACK HISTORY MONTH
and then the stock market ticker, a backed up highway:
I wonder is it the superbowl or are we finally being bombed
and everyone knows but us and is fleeing.
There is no place to flee. I am here for the duration.
I say heart is heavy, angel of death all around
no wonder so many hearts just stopped this week, say
I don't can't always talk about it but sometimes
I need to spend my tiny free time staring at dark water.
I can't believe they don't lock up this river.
Always the refuge of abandoned, only a silver.
Heart heavy, dark water full of mystery only thing that holds.
Dark water trickles from my eyes, only a trickle.
Been stealing time to work on the edits for the way disabled people love each other, the next poetry book, which might be getting done and sent out soon, waiting on some readers to give feedback. Been stealing time to work on the new memoir, too.
I’ve been working on different versions of “dirty river part 2” for oh, a while now. a few people remember when I was working on something that I thought would be the part 2, around 2018-2019. there’s about 30k in draft, and some of the writing included going to be with my friend annah in her house under the PG and E lines by the dry creek, in the repurposed lesbian schoolbus with the curtains and the norcal drought smell of cal pop about to crackle and burst. then, i thought i was writing a memoir of oakland 2007-2014, the birth of disability justice, the “ if dirty was about running away from amerika and your parent, this next one will be about what happens after you come back.” it also, again, was a desire to document an underdocumented time. myspace generation sequeing into early fb, and the qtpoc promised land utopianism of oakland back then. living well on very little money with a lot of other runaways who didn’t come from money doing the same. before google hit and most of us not middle class and up got priced out.
maybe that book will still be written and it’ll be the third in a trilogy of out-of-order memoirs. but then covid and all else happened and instead, i’m writing something else. right now I’m at that bit at the middle beginning where the bones start to form in the bread, you can see the gems strung on the necklace of what chapter will be where when you’re lying in bed at night thinking about it. we draw a curtain of barbed wire around most of it, but I can say, some of what it’s about is what complex grieving can be for people who become ancestors who hurt you. scams // con artistry // masking// survival // hustling, the overlap and the differences. the root of con is the same root as the word conjure. the shifting ideas and mechanics of race passing for survival versus race shifting for theft. the ideas of fake crips, fake genders, that all of us are hustling and hoodwinking and trying to get one over on the state. but we’re being who we really are.
thanks to people who have popped up out of the woodwork lately saying that dirty river meant something to you. it’s gonna be ten years next year that that feral book that came out the year I turned 40, that I worked on for most of my 30s a couple hours/ weeks at a time. i still like it. when I flip through it, I see what i wasn’t ready to write in it yet. What I didn’t know yet, what I left out out of grace and protection and wish. People often told me your book is so intense and I would nod politely, but what I didn’t always say was, I left a lot of stuff out.
When it comes to thinking about the ethics of writing your survivorhood, it’s never been as simple as that oft-cited line “if they wanted you to write about them better they should’ve treated you better,” to me. There are some people who I can write about that way with impunity. There are also people where I sit with a lot more complexity about what part of what stories I can tell.
But: you can write about the people who are survivors who abused you, with as much grace, compassion and “I understand their intergenerational trauma” as you can muster. You can leave out the worst parts. And they can still not see any of that and come to jesus.
Because, here’s the thing: people who were abusive to you, they didn’t abuse you because you were good or bad, and you can’t make them not be abusive by being really good or writing really good. They abused you because they made that choice. They might be still making it.
Writing your survivor story is, at best, something that tells a mean, good story. It’s not healing in a therapist office and it doesn’t have to be “healing.” Maybe it offers healing for you or others, because the story makes a new portal into a next, as well into the past.
Those that hurt you, they had choices and made them. Their choices to be of account, to heal, to change, are still theirs.
Your writing is not the magic spell that can make your child or younger self finally have people apologize. If you’re lucky, it’s a magic spell that changes you by the process of writing it.
“Campfire on the superfund site,
Garbage island fucking in the moonlight…
they don't even really know my name
I'm so happy that we escaped from where we came.”
Suheir Hammad wrote, “power to the artists who are becoming braver even now".” I wish that for us, and leave you with that hope.
See you in the whirlwind. Stay open to what’s next. Protect find and use your magic. Find and keep memory.
xx
L
This was beautiful, thanks for writing this