1. To seek shelter under heavy rainfall. The girl in me perpetually knocking at your door, at a door. Whatever structure I try to build, an elephant walks in, and the ceiling can’t take it, the walls won’t hold it.

2. I arrive at the poem to be made and remade. Today I cannot forgive myself.

3. The hole inside is narrowing, widening, splintering, and forming new holes. I try to smile at a baby and feel like an imposter.

4. The death of a parent. Does that count as devastation? The body. Still standing. I couldn’t leave myself unmarked. The house leans and creaks. It lets the weather in. It refuses total collapse. There’s something luminous holding up the clavicle.

5. The blue residue of grief has settled over everything. I can’t separate the hurt from the wall or the ceiling. The body will one day refuse to do your bidding.

6. I think at first I only wanted the material. Spirit is fallacy. I weep to a God that does not exist. There’s nothing left of my father in the air. It’s a lie that the soul persists. I call and you don’t answer. I take it as definitive and watch all the colour drain from the garden.

7. To make note of his absence.

8. Latency of disrepair. Even broken structures still know how to hold. I keep time by tracking decay.

9. And living is uneven work. The wounding is sporadic, cumulative, dispassionate. The world resists the shape of your desire. No. Here, now, something in you refuses the weather. Your will is unrelenting.

10. Survival is quiet work. I hope I can sublimate the grief and not fall. Dwell.

11. To discover that longing is its own foundation. Beauty sings in unison with grief. Life is inextricable from death. We are born with it, a beginning and an end. The stage is set, and for a moment we are suspended, mythic, governed by a language of care and a language that remembers. We hurt no less, but love flowers. I am calling you in.

12. The labour of becoming

13. Note to self: Not to arrive at some imagined self, but to reckon with the truth that all life is motion, and arrival is only a moment.

ACT SEVEN

ACT EIGHT

How to feel empowered when it’s like your life doesn’t belong to you? Tenderness. There is no rain but the river is rising. Gravity is at the edge of collapse. It threatens the morning.

And God is nowhere to be found. Nothing has happened, not a miracle, not an orgasm, not even the moon or a shooting star. Forgive me.

Something like be the softness you are looking for. Be loving with what remains. Gentle hands. It’s good to let go. Tenderness.

ACT 8 won’t take place as planned. It will come in another form.

Phoenix

xxx

the garden is overrun with wanting, everything open-ended and not you must be but are

crocus

rising

from the frost. white. coolness

of winter, of brick & mortar, fall.

To refuse the closed-question and do instead the Charleston as the institution burns to ash,

a tower of salt,

a black dove in the attic. there are levels to this.

England: where small and smaller animals go to die.

and i filter all violence through ecology, through insect-desire & the person who chose to conquer & not listen to the mountain. terrible

of me to decree death under my breath but

the wound is real

but they won’t see it and will instead render it invisible, micro, insignificant.

when the theory is already there and blinding.

we have to make them see it.

why is it our job to make them see it?

why is death the only way to make them see it?

why can’t they feel it?

let the record show: Shapeshifters. Aimee Cox. Katherine McKittrick. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. Ntozake Shange. the Rainbow. Poor. Caleb Femi. Coal. Remi Graves. Jason Arday. Joy Gardner. Damilola Taylor. Shukri Abdi. Stephen Lawrence.

let the record show we tried

that we bled all over the poetry and begged God to liberate the research,

as to mean monsoon. as to mean to action a flood and testimony like water over everything, the sanctioned archives, the ongoing injustices. protect the oral tradition. our voices matter. the sorrow is already legible.

let the record show we tried

PROPOSITION:

to bypass the opium, the church bell, the voice that says push through

push through to what? death. the soul disturbed from birth to heaven.

all my dreams are like this. cockroach. my arms and legs multiplied to service the machine. what is the body?

nothing if not functional

and i want no part of the evaluation, the progress report, scrutiny

of what should be personal. take for example all eyes on my bank statement to prove I did not receive a double payment. I want no part of this.

England: where dreams are flattened by the myth of meritocracy.

the longing is absurd. i close my eyes

and return to the green country of a high street like Catford, Lewisham, Dalston.

tell me: do you want me? here? it's okay. i know he didn't mean it, mean to say it, mean to weigh up my voice in contrast to my skin, my body, eyes, mouth, heart.

and now we overcompensate for existence.

i hammer bruises along my thigh

because i don’t want to wear the burden of exposition, because i don’t know

how

how we make the grief malleable?

good little black boys and girls. tell us again how grateful you are to be here. soften the fear.

as to mean they pinned black to the body but what’s real is this.

the impossible of identity. the noose. the raid. the fiction of self written rigid on the wrong body.

let the record show: necropolitics

let the record show: collective liberation. you suffer, i suffer, i suffer with you

PROPOSITION:

and to move the birdcage from noun to verb. a body fortified by misunderstanding. i can’t listen to Nina without rainfall. even the sky cries too. how could this be us.

all of us culpable of terror and erasure.

everyone lies.

silence.

to hold in your mouth the names of the dead and not tremble. no i won’t let you inside his name. comprehension is paramount.

rest in power, Jason Arday

REFERENCES / LET THE RECORD SHOW

1. Ishy Pryce-Parchment, Refusing the Closed Question

2. Aimee Meredith Cox, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship

3. Katherine McKittrick, “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place”

4. Stuart Hall, “Minimal Selves”

5. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

6. Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf

7. Caleb Femi, Poor

8. Remi Graves, Coal

9. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics”

10. Nina Simone, Baltimore & I Shall Be Released

11. Greentea Peng, Suffer

Please consider signing this petition for a public inquiry into the role of the press in Jason Arday’s death, and the need for greater accountability in journalism.

CROCUS

I’ve been trying to find the thing that’s making its way through my bloodstream. Not blood exactly, but something older, something with the patience of water.

Desire.

To write towards the possibility of staying with yourself. I don’t want to die but how else to kill the hate. Secretly, I resent everyone. I’m past the point of fatigue. Blood is noise, a noose, an obligation. The price of love is sacrifice. You make me feel like I don’t matter.

This is a reminder to breathe.

This is a reminder to breathe.

And the sea enters first. Then the watch. My father’s watch. In the bed of my mouth. Beneath my tongue. Its hands still moving, even when I have reached capacity.

Which is to say I’ve been thinking about time,

which is another way of saying I have been thinking about the dead.

The way they continue to happen to us. The way a person can die and remain alive in the body of someone else. I can’t swallow time, but I’m trying. I can’t swallow the sea, but I’m trying.

Clock → Flower. Breathe.

Somewhere behind me there is a chain of women carrying what they were never taught how to put down.

Mother.

The word becomes a room I keep entering and leaving.

Inheritance → Choice

What have I inherited that I don’t want to continue carrying? What do we spend years trying to repair? What will keep us alive? What happens when shelter becomes another word for endurance?

I’ve spent so long in the house of temporality. A small dwelling for who I was in January, in March, built from things that can barely hold themselves together. Cardboard. Paper. Clay. Language. Memory. I build, I build, and call it shelter, as though I can construct a place in which nothing can reach me, as though enough architecture could make a body believe it belongs somewhere.

Shelter. Meaning not to be fortified against the weather, or against weathering, just somewhere to go when the tempest wails.

Shelter. Meaning a form like language, or another body, or

the hand that doesn’t ask you to explain why you’re wet.

House → Shelter

What happens to a person when they’ve spent a long time trying to prove their existence as worth something?

I return often to the immigrant.

To the memory of being raided by the police before the sun had begun to rise. Where my childhood became the production of evidence. You will not deny me of my right to be here and to belong. Ruins.

Proof → Body

Lately I’ve been afraid that I don’t matter.

I don’t matter.

Right now, that sentence sits on my chest like stone, watching, watching me work, not work. I want to leave it be.

What have I become?

1. Here is the degree I almost finished.

2. Here is the poem.

3. Here is the residency.

4. Here is the performance.

5. Here is the workshop.

6. Here is the table covered in earth.

7. Here is the house made from cardboard.

8. Here is the body that kept going.

9. Here is the body that kept going.

10. Here is the body that kept going.

I have loved enough and done enough.

Achievement → Aliveness

TRUTH

To turn grief into language, language into work, work into proof. This is how I make something beautiful from whatever has broken open inside me.

But grief doesn’t always want to be or become beautiful.

Sometimes it wants to be grief. Sometimes the garden is just the garden. Sometimes the dead are just dead. Sometimes the mother can’t give what the daughter needed/needs. Sometimes the daughter can’t go back and become the child who should have been held. Sometimes there is no lesson. Sometimes there is only the body, still warm. Still breathing. Still asking. Still here.

WHAT IS NECESSARY

Grief.

The trees. A moving body of water. I am here for you unconditionally. Put down the watch. Time is flawed. I refuse the myth of Sisyphus. I don’t want Icarus. I want rest. I deserve rest. Let go.

The standard is different when you are black. Let go.

And underneath it all here is the body. My body. Not an archive. Not a project. Not a site of evidence, or a house I have failed to maintain.

Breathe.

Here is the body. Warm. Breathing. A little frightened, a little furious, but still capable of wanting, wanting… Survival → Desire

Is it selfish that I want the world to rearrange itself to prove that I matter?

Life is difficult. The body asks for rain. The body asks for sleep. The body asks to be touched gently. The body asks to go outside. The body asks to let go of all memory of hurt. I open my mouth.

I am made and remade.

Swallowing → Speech

FRAGMENT FROM THE SIXTH ACT OF SHELTER

And not to arrive at the illusion of a dream-self, but more so to reckon with the truth that all life is motion, and arrival is only a moment.

But God do I want to feel that moment like rain,

like running water over everything.

Inheritance → Choice

Clock → Flower

To reference the flower is to call on Sylvia Wynter’s On Being Human as Praxis. It’s to refuse the expectation of linearity, and instead trust in the sun and falling water to do as they do, and in myself to do as I do. Being human, doing human.

And beneath the surface, the promise, the action, the object, the dream, the yearning, the blues. What cannot yet be named. What is still becoming. It will take root. Something is taking root. I can’t yet say what. All life is motion.

Phoenix

xxx

P.S.

I’ll be sharing some writing from Acts 6 and 7 soon. But before I could return to those pieces, I needed to put this down somewhere first.

I’m also running a workshop this Saturday + the next Twelve Acts of Shelter is on Friday 28 August. Details and links below.

@PRESENT TENSE, 4 FERNTOWER ROAD

15.08.26: Language as Shelter, Poetry & Making Workshop

28.08.06: ACT 8: Twelve Acts of Shelter

28/04/26

A paper house. A cardboard house made of slats. Small lights kept alive amidst the body weathering uncertainty. The morning comes. Spring arrives slowly and then retreats. Today it hails.

And I am overtaken by the feeling of this, here, now, and how necessary it became to try and make something luminous. Something to hold the grief without letting it consume me. The word distraction is beautiful.

But there’s something about a designated marker of time in which to pour out memory. I think of a refuge island. Of life as a country road made up of collisions. Of the evening as a raised concrete platform where, for a moment we let the body be, speak, collapse, sing. All of us small and stubborn animals.

And I am drifting always, I use my hands to mimic the notion of the wave. I’m up and down, I rise and fall, I gather my scraps. I wallpaper a bughouse made of pine wood.

Last week, I found myself watching ‘The Sky Is Everywhere’. It took me back to the girl I once was, and how I treasured the book with a kind of holy hunger. I remembered the ache of her clarinet, his trumpet, and how music can abandon us and then return and then abandon us.

It isn't up to me to make sense of the arrow, or how love can ask us to remain porous to the world after something like loss. Everything is pink and raw. Don’t touch.

And some days I am without skin, dismissive when I mean to be kind. I’m interrogating the performance of strength. Black-woman-me. The burden of the adjective and how I have learned to inhabit it. Grief can make even more an island of the self, it can sharpen every edge.

But somewhere beneath the ache there is still the slow instinct toward light, toward being held by what survives, toward promising yourself that you will survive too.

(This is where I say forgive me for the sentiment. Prose is like a wet sponge. In the poetry I can tell you about a badger left to rot on the side of the road, and how I no longer scream at the sight of death and decay. How I think often about maggots. Life is easier I find, if you are already buried in the dirt of it. Worms are romantic)

I think of my younger self now with a kind of gratitude, how comfort surfaces in ways you don’t understand till later. It feels silly that the houses are a lifeline,

but the sky is everywhere and flesh. Desire lives in a wet mound of compost. I want to climb you like oak tree. This difficult season is not forever. I hope you can love me through it all.

These offerings are starting to feel less like artefacts and more like small illuminated rooms where spirit gathers. Memory has teeth. And even though the world insists on rupture, on cruelty, forgetting, I choose instead a fragile architecture of feeling: the glowing window, the hand returning to music, to reverberation, the house lit softly against the dark. Praise song for moonlight. Your senses are singing.

Thank you for reading. I hope to see you there.

Phoenix

xxx

Embalmed,

somewhere in the wound. Stop holding it. There’s a makeshift house in the garden. Let it go there. There is where the sorrow lies. Let free the body and unbury the wind. I’m learning now surrender. That grief is the second grave you dig yourself. Do not spend too long eating dirt. Visit often. But allow moments for memory, a new web with a skin like leather to bring to the ghosts. I say this: this is how I keep you, how I keep him alive.

And the frenzy will find its way back. A zest for living. What it takes to rise every morning and commit to the wearing of a softer, kinder, skin. A house of my own, making. This is what I mean by fortress.

IN THE MAKING OF THE FOURTH HOUSE, I REMAKE THE THIRD HOUSE

I’m finding solace in the construction of things. To go back and consider first the foundation, then how to raise the roof so the walls do not cave in. My new love is the glue gun.

A friend tells me she’s learning to sit in what follows after success; fortune, the cost of a birthing, something like an eruption, not like childbirth but more like digging through thick, weedy soil, like shucking an oyster. And inside the pearl. You deserve to feel good.

But the undercurrent is exhaustion. What’s playing on my phone is this: Canyon wants to hear C Sharp by Andrew Bird. The song feels like searching, like filtering through memory, debris, a thesaurus, broken glass, a painting, to make sense of what refuses to settle. It’s like with the poetry, how Lucie Brock-Broido said in an interview that her “theory is that a poem is troubled into its making. It’s not a thing that blooms; it’s a thing that wounds.” There is nothing I can do, or say, to bring my father back. There’s something about agony that pushes a thing into being.

And where I reside is discipline. I worry I don’t have the energy, but the declaration was made in January, and I don’t want to let myself down.

Which is to say that I am trying to build something that can hold me. I understand now that all things are temporary, a moment, and what reverberates is spirit, and some things are still too painful, and may always be, but what I need is new memory, is a catalogue, an archive of triumph, that death did not get me today. My birdhouses are weatherproof.

I want to return to the third act, the open mic, someone’s confession that yesterday they wanted to end their life. Living is brutal.

And then I think of Sonia Sanchez.

This is not a small voice

This is not a small love

Nothing you do is small.

In a poem I return to my first summer of love. I am sixteen and want to tell her too that nothing she does is small. That nothing we do is small.

THE THIRD ACT

Twelve acts of shelter in a year unfolding. What’s on the other side of grief is more grief, and perhaps something like a wetland and little sanctuaries scattered across the landscape. The poem doesn’t end here. Over there you are loved. Everywhere you are loved, just walk a little further.

And to gather here together, thank you. All around us a poetics of relation. It’s unmeasurable, the falling water of it all, how your bruises are my bruises, how she has a voice that trembles, a story to tell, that could rouse the angels if they listened. He sees the cogs of empire still turning and delivers a tapestry. Prophetic. The sound and the fury of want, of let me translate the years of yearning, of longing, of shouldering the weight of indifference. And all around us, the blues blooming. The thin line between pain and pleasure is walked by a saxophonist, a clarinet, I mean I’m crying, I mean I’m laughing, I mean my body feels it here, the sorrow, and here, the joy. And the percussion

carries me to the pouring rain, the sporadic birdsong. Somewhere you are mending the scars and cross stitching the wounds closed. No bleeding wrists here, only White Russians and metaphors. We all have our vices.

IN PREPARATION FOR THE FOURTH ACT

And now, April. There are parts of me still animal, still reaching toward mud, toward instinct, something unrefined and unapproved. The body is astonishing. I try to haunt my father back, even though I know there are no words to raise him from the dead. My boyfriend’s hands are stained with compost and top soil, and I feel guilty that this a memory I don’t have with Dad. Only the sound of him cutting the grass and me asking him to take it easy through the window. But maybe the garden becoming is its own spectral language. I want to honour my father with what grows. His eyes and hands are my inheritance.

GRIEF AND THE IMAGINED ANIMAL

The mammoth does not sleep. It watches me tend to small houses and smaller animals. I bring water to the garden as if it could dilute it. As if anything could.

My mother is not my father. I miss my dad and feel more guilt about my anger. Anger.

I surprise myself with exhaustion. Spring makes me fearful. In truth, now I avoid the garden because decay seems more plausible. The green leaves are proof of life circling death, and vice versa, but in case of flesh, what’s gone is gone. What’s gone is gone. Sometimes I’m strong. Sometimes I’m not.

Monday. What’s the difference between bereavement support and bereavement counselling? I conflate grief and depression. I don’t want to talk about how my father died, just need to get through the slog and not cliff jump. I’m uncomfortable with the way my mother clings to me. I’m uncomfortable with the quiet outside and that I won’t be woken by the sound of a blade hacking grass. Somehow, he always found the strength. I need to get through the slog.

Halfway through the session I tell her I don’t want to continue. That the digging is pointless because the soil stays with me anyway. That’s there’s no relief in circling the wound. I want pressure, a new wound, to be distracted. Death is death. Words are words. I put the phone down,

and return to the woolly mammoth in my room, while she calls another grieving animal.

And the woolly mammoth, unchanged in size, says look at me. Grief is where the abyss talks back.

And I’m wracked with guilt because I have no desire to be what you need me to be. Who’s tears are whose?

And the mountain. The grief is too large to hold. I’m sorry for the mountain. For asking you to hold the mountain while gripping the back of my legs. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Not the cancer, no mention of death in the cards. I wanted love, for you to witness me as poet, and all else, sweet fortune, not the giving up of dreams, or the giving up of time.

And it’s true what they say, how grief billows, expands, engulfs every thought of prosperity. How you have to grow around it and wade through it, the thick of it, the dark fog, slog, a shark tooth wedged in your funny bone. This morning everything hurt.

And this is the power of the mind, of play-pretend, the beauty of language. My father is in the trees. He is resting his head on clouds as soft as silk, and I’m trying to get back to him, to hear you. It’s Icarus-like, what the sorrow does, what you can deduct from the statistics around racial disparity, even black maternal healthcare. How we must refute what is written, what is legislated, and say instead the body is a fortress. You don’t need to see what you believe to know it’s there.

And A Litany for Survival resounds through my body and soul. Audre Lorde writes: ‘So it is better to speak remembering. we were never meant to survive.’

Let in the light.

I think of Icarus, that he must have seen something beautiful. That perhaps he did touch the sun.

And it’s something like the red thread in the film ‘La chimera’. What you don’t release will bury you. Let in the light.

A blue flower pokes through the earth. I was worried nothing would grow. Stay with me. The woods are an ocean of bluebells.

Thank you for reading. I hope to see you there.

Phoenix

xxx

And I am thinking about anger, not as rupture but as potency, material. A current that insists on being felt, held, directed.

BLKNWS. March. In this act, I am presented with the frame of terms & conditions as a speculative grammar for living otherwise. This is where the document becomes an opening, a reorientation of what is permitted, imaginable, livable. The questions come like this: How do we gather in the wake, where nothing is past and everything is present? What does it mean to build shelter from what has already broken us? What do we carry forward in the body, and what do we lay down? What must we refuse in order to keep living?

And in this sense, the poems become legible acts of worlding. Each line, a small insistence: this is a way to live. This is a way to feel. This is a way to remain. To remain.

Embodiment → Survival / The blue residue of grief. A paper house.

And my hands, the construction of small dwellings for even smaller animals, extend this further. The poems insist on form, and I wallpaper my dreams onto slabs of wood, tracing paper, cardboard. Things we do for love. And I want to love this life and not feel burdened by guilt, or shame, or grief. My father said let the light in. That’s why he left at daybreak and did not stop, despite the stage 4 cancer, the swollen feet. He died early in the morning.

On fragility made visible. On the tenderness of creation.

Pine wood, nails, the slow, deliberate act of making a birdhouse, of learning to make a birdhouse. First lesson is please make sure the glue and the glaze are non-toxic and able to withstand weathering. My interior worlds are pressed against the surface of home like enter me, like sing real and true this dream to present memory.

There is something of the child here,

of play, but also of survival. In the making of the third house I return to the estates I grew up in, not in their exactness, but in their afterimage: cardboard, flattened, 2D. Windows cut out with care, revealing interiors rendered in tracing paper where women are suspended in a kind of half-light. There are shared rooms, shared walls, a homage to Kerry James Marshall, Danielle McKinney, Nina Simone. These are the worlds that sustain me, and within that, an early knowledge: that one can retreat inward. That one can build elsewhere. That fantasy is not always escape, but sometimes architecture.

The blue residue of grief, of moonlight, of what settles in the after of a shipwreck. What is absurd is ordinary.

And I am thinking about the note as method, the accumulation of fragments, gestures, small observations that, together, hold the weight of living. The event comes together in that energy, and I am grateful to all those who surround me for staying with me in the chaos. Nothing is insignificant. This is where force gathers.

How to Prepare the Body for Spring

And Audre Lorde resounds. Red thread follows me everywhere; the body is a site of knowledge, the erotic must be reclaimed. I search for sensation. I enact refusal. I go back and forth between the erotic and pornography: where one opens, the other performs. One deepens. The other flattens. And yet, even within performance, there is something to be stolen back. Something to be re-scripted. Pleasure, here, becomes a question: who does it belong to? Who is it for? In this moment, what am I feeling, and where is it taking me?

Live music. The force that gathers as a collapsing and an expanding. Harmony, disharmony, this stone in my throat made legible, vivid, and moving like liquid, like smoke. An undoing the illusion of separation.

And something uncontained, unresolved, surfaces. There is a collective attunement that does not resolve into ease. It’s never easy.

There is sadness. But not as failure, as a trailing feather. Blue ink stains everywhere along the edge. Each act of being carries it forward, the heartbreak. Sometimes the world meets you unevenly,

resists the shape of your desire, but here, this moment, is a refusal to be anything but your will.

This month, my poetry has circled these tensions: force and fragility, anger and tenderness, structure and dream. And I return, again and again, to the question of how to build while breaking. How to hold the body as both shelter and still, motion.

Show me how to remain inside the longing without being consumed by it.

So, Act III begins with a different knowledge, a root pulled from the afterimage of winter. A seasonal knowing. Yes, we are all tired, but that exhaustion belongs to inheritance, not sleep. A low, steady hum of bones that know that know

Spring is a provocation to risk emergence. To demand the door as open. I pray that weariness will not inhibit me. I want a room larger than the one I inhabit. A place where my body can extend and misbehave. Where feeling does not have to fold itself into corners, and my cello lives comfortable.

I’ve started playing again. I don’t know if it’s in tune. I don’t know if I’m doing it correctly. But there is something in the holding, in the negotiation between pressure and release, as my arms are trying to figure out how to sustain a sound without breaking it. I’m learning that my fragility is not weakness, but just requires precision, attention, care.

In this, there is a kind of rehearsal. Not for performance, but for being. For staying with what is uncertain and allowing what feels imperfect to continue.

Act III is not yet formed. It will happen tomorrow, 31^st March, and will be felt out in small preparations. In the quiet decision to remain open, even when tired. Even when unsure. Thank you.

Thank you for reading. I hope to see you there.

Phoenix

xxx

Instead, I find myself contending with the fact of flesh and something like hunger. How the body demands that you hold yourself inside wanting. And I, woman, am taught to forgo necessity, to make a virtue of restraint. The desire for smallness is a thing that kills. Not all dreams are selfish, and even if they are, perhaps to have the cake and eat it too suggests multitudes of self, moments detached briefly from order. What’s wild

about a room of my own, about the palpability of a haunting, a reckoning, that my father can hear from beneath and above the soil, and like God, he chooses silence? What’s wild about delusion, about piracy, and choosing to surrender flesh for water? All I am is made of dreams.

Lately I’ve been thinking about time. Deadlines I meant to meet. Opportunities I watched pass. Another year, and I’m still holding loose threads. Yet the poems arrive faithfully. For this I am thankful. I feel lucky, and grateful to move through rooms filled with artists. I’m grateful to experience and witness devotion in this way.

And yet another voice like an echo in my throat: they do not yet build a house. And it’s true. I cannot eat my poems. The shelter is metaphor. Sometimes all I want is brick and mortar. Still, I write. The poems do not leave me. They never leave me.

Perhaps the in-between is the line between spirit and matter. Help me find grace, endurance, a faith that is steadfast.

Sometimes the poems feel like stones in my pockets, and I’m caught in the coming of a rip current, searching for a place to gather air, a place to rest. This dream can feel foolish. And still, it’s what brings me the most calm, what keeps me tethered to the living. Maybe,

this is only a season of gathering.

Still, I think about my parents, about how deeply I want to make them proud and still do this thing I love. I think about a clock, how quick its hands move, and still the body hungers.

I can’t not be who I am

is all I want to say to my mother. Let me be, and if I could, I would shrink and let you carry me. But desire insists on being named. I can only promise to love and to continue to love and not leave completely.

My mother. Who I am is an ode to her beauty, her grace, her resilience. But I will not shrink. This life is mine. These dreams are mine and are already written. I call on words like spells to soothe the ache.

And it comes to me like this: perhaps grace is here in the letting go, in the commitment to embracing this in-between and no doubt.

Though in truth, I’m afraid. I can’t not be who I am.

I want a lighthouse. I want to be the water and the rising.

My dreams are water,

And as Toni Morrison writes in The Site of Memory, “all water has perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”

So, allow the memory. Allow the body remembering.

This is an invitation to

Act III. Tuesday 31^st March 2026. All that’s required is tenderness, is presence. Come to witness, to listen, to feel what rises in response to the poetry and the installation.

Thank you for reading.

Love always,

Phoenix

x

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I don’t want to write. There is poetry in the avoiding of things. Nothing means anything in the way it once did, and importance feels subjective, conditional. You either think of me or you don’t think of me at all. My world is run over with binaries, but what I need is dialectic. I want to be better at exposition. I want to hurt less. I want to be shiny and alone, and leave the poems to rot. I’m not anywhere yet, not anywhere worth writing home about. It haunts me. The question of whether this would make my father proud. Yes. No. I don't know.

And so my poems are often incomplete. In the not-writing I am sexless, wound up, compromised. Everything still swells with grief.

Everything still swells with grief, and even when something like possibility flickers, I wrestle often with the thought of the why and what purpose. Grace seems as follows: I am inside the coffin.

Last week I watched My Father’s Shadow at the Barbican Centre. Twenty minutes later, I walked into a different room and watched The Chronology of Water. I think I just wanted memory. There wasn’t enough time to sit with either film and think. Instead, it was the undoing of sequence. The body collapsing inside moment stretching to moment without permission for tears or ache. Only remembering two little girls and my father, all of us containing multitudes, the past pulling itself into the present.

And as both boys wept on the screen in front of me, I forced myself to skip past the memory of blue and how the earth was caked in mud and I carried the cemetery home on the bottom of my navy-blue dress. We all wore blue to bury him.

And in the cinema, all of us breathless, I could feel the breaking, the attempt to swallow the largeness of death, the absurdity of life. Their little bodies trailing behind a coffin of what once held their beginning.

I don’t want to forget my mother. My father was a workaholic.

The Chronology of Water, and how the first lesson we learn as women is that our bodies do not belong to us. How often that lesson is taught first by the men we love. Sometimes that lesson is violent, inconceivable, and yet true. Sometimes it’s a culture organised around respectability. Oftentimes, it’s silence. And the journey is a re-possessing of what should be, homecoming. Sometimes I wish I could’ve been my father’s son. My stubbornness would be my will and my will would be less challenged and less of a problem.

And still, I am my Father’s daughter. By which I mean, there’s the dream daughter and the solid present of self, and I can’t find a place for the anger I feel at my own father’s absence. There’s always a cost.

And silly, this, but I can’t stomach the fact that my father never saw me read. It makes me want to turn away from the poetry. I think at my core I always wanted his permission to follow my dreams.

And water falls over everything. The wind blows, and God’s light shimmer-shines in this inbetween. Say poetry, prayer, poetic exaltation. I build a paper house and make real an impulsive desire. The way through feels improbable, and what I know is to write, is to record the weather inside my head, the animal of wanting and not-wanting.

I want to hold myself accountable. I want to give the months a solid shape, not lose time, not lose myself in all this drowning, raw skin, rage. I don’t want to grieve. There is clarity in loss, in the overwhelming knowledge of absurdity as life follows behind a wooden coffin. I don’t want to have to commit to life.

But Twelve Acts of Shelter. The desire to give time a body. My father died with his dream made brick and mortar. All of us British in a house with a garden. I’m angry.

And I can feel my will sinking into obscurity. I desire the dark and only half-like the light. Maybe it’s seasonal depression. Maybe it’s grief refusing to organise itself. I am still here. With lots of little things to do. I’m trying my best.

It's yesterday, and I leave a little gold horse, a letter, and two purple flowers on my father’s grave. Rain falls over everything.

And rain falls over everything. I’m walking towards a bench. The wind is eating my umbrella. What I desire is collapse. I find a bench and begin to smoke and rain keeps falling over everything. Time,

Time passes. The joint burns, a woman runs past me, looks at me strangely and I understand that I’m stone and tense, clutching a dark blue umbrella under a sky with no rain. White seagulls surround me. And the earth is green. The pain is only a moment among moments. We’ll be alright. Think Kendrick Lamar at the Grammys in 2016. How survival can be staged. How endurance can be spoken out loud.

And the pain loses its grip.

What counts as shelter when permanence feels like a lie?

I must begin with what I can hold.

Twelve Acts of Shelter: A Year of Houses

Act One was golden.

Each poet, the music, a bright sun, and soft landing of water, rainfall. It felt like being held without being asked to explain. I’m not alone in the grief. This is how I keep going inside it. I’ll share fragments of everything in an official post soon, but for now I want to let that night live where it happened.

Act II is next week, Tuesday the 24th. I’m anxious, but I trust what happens when we gather together and listen. Yes, the houses are temporary, but a quiet knowledge surfaces in the residue of desire. I’m learning a new shape. I pray I’ll be alright.

This is what remains.

Thank you for reading.

Love always,

Phoenix

P.S. Click here for updates and write ups A Year of Houses

Sometimes the poem is a refusal to let the love disappear quietly.

IN

DEFENCE

OF THE

POETRY

/ GRIEF

AS TESTIMONY

Struck a chord. The suggestion of a world where grief can afford to stay private. I don’t live there. I wanted to disappear, but sometimes life isn’t padded against collapse.

What’s true is this: there’s bitterness behind the voice that confuses silence with virtue. What I have are my words and nowhere else to go. And what I know is this: just because you speak it does not make it law. We’re all crumbling under the weight of someone else’s shame, someone else’s judgement, but these things are not yours to carry. Go back inwards.

The origin of this text is anger.

Some things are unspeakable.

And yet language offers a bridge into the unknown.

What to do

when grief has nowhere to go?

Tell me what to do.

Sometimes strength is just decoration in a burning house.

I keep falling.

The origin of this text is anger.

What’s the meaning of the word bruise? Cause-and-effect. The touching of something tender.

Come to me.

Pleasure and prosperity.

The snakes are all riled up, but my eyes are dove-like, close to gone and heaven/hell in my notes app. It isn’t like me to hate.

And what I mean is the bruise was already there. I cannot speak for the dead. I am angry at the dead. I’m overwhelmed and need to ask you this.

What is a document, a video, a poem, a public expression of grief, if not a river that has burst its banks? I refuse the suggestion of content. The river has burst its banks. The alphabet carries the tide back home. It’s the paper that says come here. I’ll mop up the tears.

I love you.

And you are allowed to cry. To write. To record that video. To be bitter and angry. And if it affects me, then what I can do is walk myself out of your virtual world and quell the anger with tea or a hot chocolate.

I love you,

and need not your permission.

IN

DEFENCE

OF THE

POETRY

This is how I survive; you may look, or you may leave.

It’s a new year and my heart cracks open.

12Poems began as witness to the passage of time. As the old year was still unfolding, I held on to the impermanence of things as promise of spring. I hoped that the bitterness would sweeten, that the stone in my chest would soften, and a miracle would happen. I didn’t think my father would die.

I spent Christmas morning in church. I didn’t want to go, but I’m grateful I did. It was good to get lost in someone else’s joy, to admire the beauty of my mother and sister. What I had wanted was to be surrounded my extended family. It’s easier to take care of other people than it is myself. Instead, it was quiet. Mournful. In stark contrast to last year and the fear of unmade memories with Grandpa.

I don’t know where I stand in the fabric of things. There is life beyond the grief, and within it, a love to nurture. I think I’ve found my person, and yet every good feeling feels like betrayal. And I know my life belongs to me, but the shadows are loud. I hate that I couldn’t be what he wanted me to be. And yet, the other side is that, maybe, who my father needed me to be is who I am. What the world refused him, I’ve staked my spirit on. I deal in expression.

Once my dream was to be a robot: unfeeling, obedient, make everyone happy and comfortable. Good girl. But who I am is feeling and heat and memory. A soft molten anger.

And a bell strikes the longing. Beneath the instant of sound, there’s a low, unceasing hum burrowing behind my ribs. My body as a threshold.

I think a question that resounds is: is this life worth it? A little life, a big life. Some times it costs more than it gives, and most days I wake up and the shock is a hand around my throat. I keep dreaming a way back, to tell him about the cancer before it reached stage four, but I can’t go back. Can only wade in the catastrophe, and allow the forward motion of living.

Horses fill me with glee. I like the way smoke rises from the end of a joint.

I’m sorry for the sadness. On New Year’s Eve, we watched the fireworks from a window. It was cold. I had spent all my energy on Marty Supreme. I wanted to inhabit him, to live inside his mouth and watch desire make manifest. His spine was made of gold. His words were bullshit, but the dream was true (kinda). And what rang real was this: some things are more easily available to men.

It’s a new year. I think what I am, at heart, is a diarist. It’s easier to catalogue the poems by season, and I want to get better at archiving, at documenting. Witness. I want to return to sociology in a way that anchors the poetry in the political, and always, at the forefront, that we are not without context.

I feel crow-like.

Thank you for reading. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to write, but it’s the writing that’s keeping me upright. Thank you. I hope this year is kind to you, that the harshness yields, and that good things happen to us all. Thank you. Music is everywhere.

It’s a new year. Hope feels necessary; my faith is tentative, and I want to be away with the fairies, elsewhere, but I turn twenty-seven in eight days. Time keeps moving. Pray for me.

Thank you for reading.

With love,

Phoenix

xxx

This month, I’ve been searching for that poetry. In the news. In the body. In the small violences we pretend not to notice. And I feel like I’m a bad, bad, selfish, not-good person, and perhaps my only redemption is to finish my degree. Grief is wrapped up in guilt. I want my mother to be happy, but I feel at odds with myself in church, and it does, I’m sorry, take something from me. My desires are underground, and my head is buried in the garden searching for the root of all this hurt. I cried this morning because I can’t rewrite my decisions at twenty-two, even though I know in the grand scheme of the cancer, it means nothing. And I go back and forth between robot dreams and visions of drowned birds. I must remember, must force myself to remember, that it is important to feel, that my sensitivity is what allows the poetry. I’m sorry.

I want to give thanks for the people, the poets, the artists, musicians, that steady me and insist on the beauty of alive. Their voices have kept my spine from folding. And this poem, it is where beauty and rot coexist, where love is tender, monstrous, and reveals us all as complicit. And the ending, the confession, perhaps not defeat, but devotion. I hope the poetry will see me (us) through.

Thank you for reading.

With love,

Phoenix

xxx

P.S. you can catch me reading my poems live here in London 💌

12 December, Reference Point (WC2R 3DA), Displaced Concerts, 7:30pm-11pm

17 December, Acrylicize (E2 9AP), Worms #11 Launch, 6:30pm

18 December, Staffordshire St (SE15 5TJ), STST Word Club x Literary People | readings, 7pm-11pm

And I know that we are all specks of dust in a grand universe of atoms, that I am the one holding the mirror to the sky, weeping in the rain. Tragic. Cliché. No pity, please, but let me cry. I was miserable, and searching for light, for some source of light.

Then aja.

The Barbican Conservatory.

The rain beating against the glass. I wanted to be invisible. So I did not look for a seat, and sat instead on the wall of the first aisle I saw, pretending the branch, the touching of leaves, was a silent act. I was self-conscious and afraid. Teary, with thoughts of my father, and what was handed to my mother when she came to collect his things: the brown leather watch, a letter in his backpack, his last words. His funeral rites. How long had he been carrying those words, certain of the cancer’s fatality. Knowing.

And there’s a hole I cannot fill, an ache I can’t give shape to. There’s the movement of the wave, and then there’s the running from what is.

And I don’t want to reveal anything of the chaos or the weight, but it’s like everything around me is breaking. The body should be neutral, yet grief has a negative charge. I’m sorry, and want to bury my head in the soil and ask Athena for wisdom, but even she harmed Medusa. Oya is violent wind and storm. Yemoja is Mother, Yoruba goddess of the rivers and oceans, but what use are myths, my emblems, my dreams of horses, when the world is wicked, the Niger Delta is poisoned, and my birth-land, all land, is fractured. What use is any of this when the rain refuses to stop and my father is gone. What use was the struggle for nationality when two days before his death, at our doorstep, finally, the British passport. I don’t want to think but I don’t know how not to.

That day, the tears spawn from the Niger Delta. My heart aches at unfortune moments. All the way through the poetry, aja monet’s voice, the sunlight in her throat, I leak a river, wanting to be like her, to walk through life like her, with devotion, with a clarity of self shaped with graceful hands.

And what I mean is she did not just arrive, but worked and toiled to be the woman we see. I mean maybe this is the other side of the hurting. The glimmering. The presence of a bright light and life. A room full of diamonds, monstera, gladioli, and speckled heart-shaped leaves running wild across a glasshouse. Somewhere water is flowing with ease as the sky wails above us.

And what I mean is humility. A wholehearted loving of the world and all its people. A willingness to witness the brutality of what we turn our eyes from, and still it sits in the bones (it must). I mean to show up, to gather breath, to commit to the organising of breath for the movement of the wave.

And in this moment, I return to the words of Maysoon Abu Dweih EI-Kurd, mother of Mohammed El-Kurd’s, who said that “the wind will certainly blow in the direction my ships covet”. Breath will gather, gathers, as the past, present, and future collide. All my people billowing as wind, gathering all the air in our lungs to topple every weapon formed against us.

I mean why are your dreams built on bloodlust. I mean why must I be down for you be to up. I mean I’ll take your wilful ignorance and give you a goblet of honey that forever overflows, because love and kindness know no measure in their expansion. They will ripple outwards.

And I have to believe this. I have to believe it in order not to disappear or die. Despite the darkness, and my eyes fortified against ghosts, I can still hear the music of my ancestors. I can still feel the presence, the strength of my father, and what I want is not to overcome or to triumph over this loss, but to feel safe enough to grieve. To allow myself, for a moment, maybe, to collapse and not try to control the after. What remains is neurosis, but still everything has a chip somewhere.

I want more than what I was given, more than I’m “allowed” to have. I want to feel worthy as me, and to write in a quiet room, a place of my own. I want to teach, to dedicate my life to the colouring of flowers, to the tending of the earth, young minds, and the writing. The writing will always be my reprieve, but God I am tired and I have to believe in something. I have to believe

that my father did not die because this world is cruel but died because. No. Just that meaning is unknowable And in the meantime, here is a rose garden. Every loss is inconceivable and we are all deserving of gentleness.

Thank you for reading.

With love,

Phoenix

xxx

I recognise my devotion to poetry in my mother’s love for God. This is what sustains us in a militant world with long, sharp, shark teeth. There are perfect victims, bad and good citizens, state-sanctioned terrorism. Empathy is never a given. And it feels useless to try and remain tender. It’s impossible not to keep my eye on Sudan, to not think about Ochanya Elizabeth, that the systematic rape of women and children is not divorced from genocide, from global violence. Then there’s Nobody’s Girl. How we’re all nobody’s girl. It’s impossible not to focus on the fragility of the body, on the absurdity of joy as all things fall apart. But listen, I don’t know where I’d be without June Jordan, and in one of her poems she writes there is no chance we will fall apart.

And perhaps this is where the thread begins to fray. There’s what’s true and what you want to be true. There’s life and then there’s death. I’m smack bang in the middle of a literal existential crisis. And I’m unsure of anything, of the point in anything, or what it means to be alive and to be a person. I’m angry at everyone. My world is small. I wish my dad could rise up like Lazarus. One more memory, one more word. Did you love me? Were you proud of me? Who I am now?

I want my life to mirror his except Let there be no more poverty. Let there be no more suffering. Help me to keep my heart open. I don’t want to be selfish or selfless. I just need to believe that my cup will always run over. I want to believe that my cup will always run over. I don’t want to give up on myself. I don’t want to fall. I love my boyfriend. I love my mother and my sisters, my father, the branching bloodline of family. I love my friends. I love the woods. I love cannabis. I love love. I love poetry. I love small animals, big animals, pretend animals. I love the cinema. I love bookshops. I love prickly pears. I love the song Take Off Your Cool by Outkast. I love Nina Simone. I love Doechii. I love stripes. I love Zora Neale Hurston. I love.

It scares me the only way out is through. When right now I can’t really stand myself. But I pray this will soon pass. I want to go back.

Back in time to where darkness was light and I knew nothing but the water that held me. Every falling leaf brings me back to you. You’re haunting me.

Three days ago I told the doctor that I still don’t understand. And she was kind enough to say: I don’t think you can or you will. This is a mountain to climb and how you feel is as aspected. Is normal.

And there is still the body, the stars, the earth, the little green birds. Hope is strange and wingless. A sapling rises up towards the sky.

Thank you for reading.

With love,

Phoenix

xxx

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The words are simple. It’s the ground that’s scorched earth. I love you. Thank you. I forgive you. Please forgive me.

I had memorised those previous four sentences the night before. Maybe I could feel it coming, but I didn’t know my dad would die the next morning. I just knew that I felt heavy. It’d had been just over a year since his stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis, and I was still muddled— confused, angry, afraid. Heartbroken.

And I wanted to tell him that I loved him.

That I was sorry for my fear.

That I was sorry for not being the daughter he needed me to be.

And I wanted to tell him that I forgave him for the burden, that I couldn’t imagine how hard it must have been to start over, to be told your qualifications didn’t matter. But he continued to love, to care.

You loved and cared in a country that told you to your face, it didn’t want you, even as you dedicated your life to those who had been broken by the system, to the people who needed to be held up.

And you did it with grace. With kindness. Dad, you were loved, admired, by everyone around you. Thank you for your gentleness.

There’s a picture from his 60th birthday with the both of us, side by side, smiling. If I hold it down, it’s a video, 3 seconds, and right at the end, he says “That’s my girl.” I miss you.

And I’m okay until I’m not. I go back and forth between shadows, I want to bury my head under gravel, I’m curious about the elasticity of bone, how much pressure until the patella snaps. Sometimes pain is the thing anchors you.

But what matters is his perfect peace. Is his release from suffering. I miss you.

2

I’m afraid I was foreign to him, that I held him at arm’s length because I was afraid that he would see me, and he would not like me.

But what’s true is this: he loved me, deeply. And he knew me, at my core.

Five days after his death, as I kissed his forehead in the viewing room, the words poured out of me. I thanked him for Belvedere, for the woods of Lesnes Abbey, for the house, my own room, and the garden. We had moved there in 2022. Thank you for dreaming, Dad

I love you. Thank you. I forgive you. Please forgive me.

The night before his death, I had been watching The Pitt. Dr. Robbie was comforting a son and daughter who were dealing with their father’s quick decline, his imminent death. So, to guide them through the anticipatory grief, he shared with them the Hawaiian practice of Ho’oponopono. An ancient healing technique for reconciliation and closure. What I didn’t know then was that my dad would die the next morning, that I wouldn’t see him again.

Small mercy, bitter seed in my throat: that same night, I called him, I told him I loved him, and that I bought him an air purifier.

3
I don’t know the purpose of this text. Perhaps it is a testimony, perhaps a prayer, but the poem below, I had meant to share after being caught in Tommy Robinson’s so-called ‘free speech’ protest in central London. I wanted to ask my dad how he felt about it, especially after everything we paid at every step of the citizenship process, after we had all tried so hard to belong, even after the immigration raid.

And then I was angry. Angry when I read about Nigel Farage’s promise to abolish Indefinite Leave To Remain, the main route for immigrants to gain British citizenship.

Another small mercy, a bitter seed in my throat: my dad died on Friday, 19 September. Two days earlier, on the Wednesday, he had received his British passport. Everyone in our immediate family, finally, safe.

So maybe I’m sharing this to ask you not to buy into the anti-migrant rhetoric fed to us by politicians and by the media. This “great” country was built on empire, sustained by migrant labour, and yet it still despises the migrant body. My father knew that hostility firsthand, but he also knew how to give back, how to love, how to care for those broken by the same systems that dismissed him.

And I’m asking you to consider every individual’s right to life, to humanity, to compassion. To acknowledge the global society we live in, and how our decisions, our actions, go beyond the universe of ourselves, and ripples outward with no thought of borders.

It’s that I owe you everything, not nothing. And that everything, it’s to see you and to know that the bodies we inhabit, the skins we wear are arbitrary. And to be alive under the same orbiting sun, we are the same, equal, unique, deserving.

And I think about Grenfell — the suspect choice of cladding, and how homes became coffins. Their lives were priced as disposable. And then I think about Sudan, Palestine, Congo, Nigeria, about the brokenness of our humanity, our monstrous greed.

My father gave us a house with a garden, and that security feels all the more fragile when I remember how easily safety is denied to others. Class and race are not separate here. Dad’s qualifications meant nothing when he arrived; his labour was cheapened, his humanity ignored. That’s not just race, that’s class weaponised through race. And the cycle continues. A new Sutton Trust report found that power remains five times more likely in the hands of those who went to private schools.

Anyway, I know I’m rambling. I’m lost, we’re all lost, and wandering inside systems designed to disorient us. But I want to tell you this: in spite of it all, I still love. This wild, beautiful, unknowable world. This violent earth. I still love.

And I ask you to listen to the stories of migrants in your own community. To understand the cost. To know that maybe Rylan Clark has no idea what he’s talking about when he repeats harmful myths about refugees.

Thank you for reading.

THE POEM

AMEN&AMEN emerges from my life as a migrant in the United Kingdom and from the intertwined grief, anger, and love that shapes that experience. Citizenship here is not simply a legal status; it is an ongoing labour — physical, emotional, and psychic — to assert one’s existence in a country that often refuses to recognize it.

My father navigated this reality with resilience and care. He succeeded despite systemic hostility, earning respect and love in his work, and leaving behind a life of tenderness and dignity. He was not merely a survivor; he was cherished, respected, and fully human in a society that too often dehumanizes those like him. His life is the inheritance and the anchor for this poem.

Thank you for reading.

With love,

Phoenix

xxx

P.S. I write a monthly newsletter for Worms Magazine ! Click here to subscribe to A Worm Moon 🪱 🌷

This is Poem 8 out of 12, and the year is beyond unfolding. We've breached the halfway mark, and I'm not sure I believe in miracles. The body has its own way, and maybe we're all puppets in God's theatre of cruelty. It scares me

that I can't see through my father to where it hurts, to pluck out the malignancies. Skin is skin, opaque, and it's been a year since his diagnosis. It's been three years since we moved into the house with a garden, and I had a room of my own in a family home.

It's not productive to dwell on what it took, what it cost for us to get here. But only as I'm writing this are the last couple of weeks beginning to make sense.

The last day in August

when endings feel heavy, and beginnings uncertain. There was a stone in my throat, and I couldn't write until I could. The drums were alive, and the first word was choir, was let me lend you joy, which became, let me give you joy.

I'm thankful for togetherness, for community, for how loud we live our lives. How despite the bullshit, what I do, what we do, as artists and musicians, is not bullshit. It means something. Even if it's picking someone up off the floor, and jolting the abyss so they can write again. You just have to keep moving, I have to keep moving; I will not succumb to ease of death, or misadventure. Life has value, more than product, more than wealth.

I've been thinking about the ouroboros, that greed swallows its own tail, and that cycle is death. But in my serpent myth, one is searching for the other, tail and head, and you either spiral into the becoming and let go, or you drive yourself into hell. One breaks surface, the other plunders.

All this to say pirouette, that I will love, and give generously, because in spite of it all, I have faith in my grey angels, and day by day I'll try to keep it moving.

Thank you for reading.

With love,

Phoenix

x

P.S. I write a monthly newsletter for Worms Magazine ! Click here to subscribe to A Worm Moon 🪱 🌷

and even when that truth endangers us, we must speak it anyway.

Because, what will survive of us is what we dared to say.

As Audre Lorde writes in A Litany for Survival, “it is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive.”

This poem is written in that urgency.

This poem bears witness to the violence of occupation and systemic oppression.

The anger is directed toward power, never at a people.

It asks what liberation means when one hand claims it, while another is stripped bare

It grieves the silencing of dissent,

the erasure of black and brown lives in the global conscience.

Its hope is stubborn.

Its hope is stubborn.

Thank you for reading.

With love,

Phoenix

x

How To Cure A Ghost

What Is Your Role In The Revolution?

How To Cure A Ghost is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber…

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a year ago · 74 likes · 2 comments · Fariha Róisín

only on the present and the fragility of orchids. What's the tallest sunflower you’ve seen? My face is sticky and painted with honey.

Thank you for reading.

With love,

Phoenix

x

P.S. I write a monthly newsletter for Worms Magazine ! Click here to subscribe to A Worm Moon 🪱 🌷

Thank you for reading.

With love,

Phoenix

x

P.S. I write a monthly newsletter for Worms Magazine ! Click here to subscribe to A Worm Moon 🪱 🌷

The morning is beautiful, the leaves are green and my parents are shining stars.

Today is the ceremony, the thing we’ve been labouring towards for 21 years, and it’s finally here.

The first song that plays swells in my throat, and the melancholy is overwhelming. I can feel the flight, the wave pulling you up to surface, the arrival of the sky— and yet, the stone in the pit of your stomach.

The worry that your body is too downtrodden to float, to pierce through the current and do the thing you’ve been dreaming. The thing that seemed impossible the moment the police turned to your older sister with disdain and took your mother away in handcuffs. Not yet dawn.

Years later, I learn that my father was there that night, but he jumped from a window and stayed away for a while. The knowing that two parents in jail and no income to dig your way out— my heart aches for my mother, my heart aches for my father. You learn to always think in exit plans.

University.

I live away from home, and soon my heart begins to races when the doorbell rings unexpectedly. I have to say Please tell me if someone is coming over, because I panic, and I don’t know why. I connect the dots later when it all rises to the surface and I am unable to graduate. I say this, because on this day, that first song that plays allows me to hold everything at once, and it disturbs me. The knowing. The choice in the knowing.

The song is Experience by Ludovico Einaudi. I hold up my phone with Shazam on the screen because I want to know.

Because the song is beautiful. Because this moment holds meaning, and my parents, my mother, is so happy to be here. And I am happy too, even though I can’t smile, not properly.

The photographer forces it out of me, but really, I was searching for my father amongst the witnesses— because I knew he’d be smiling, and that would make me smile.

We buy the photographs. And despite the forced smile, I cherish them,

because they exposes the complexities, the contradiction. And I can feel my mother’s joy

That the ceiling has revealed itself a sky,

and I didn’t realise how constrained I felt,

until that first breath outside the Palladian house.

I had counselling after the ceremony. I cried. Her face was stone. I cried. Her face remained stone. So I left and looked for a body of water.

I still carry the fear, but it’s easier to silence. What’s important is movement.

That I release myself from the past and know that I have the same right to exist as anyone else. That I am enough, and worthy of a good life— not a bare life — just because of borders. That we are all worthy.

I write this with the context of the current climate in mind, the anti-migrant rhetoric that is embedded in Western media, in our governments, the ICE raids happening in LA, human beings detained in dehumanising conditions— routine acts of state terror.

I’m afraid to ask my mother about her experience. But I know it was under a year, that it was God that carried her through it, that above all, you want to protect your children — and even then, we hear everything. It seeps through.

I am grateful for my parents. For the choices they made. For where we are now. And it’s taken twenty-one years— but here we are.

There are other families of trees to discover, different kinds of birds to observe, there’s a world outside of this country, and we can move from beyond the dream

into possibility, into probability, if I get serious about saving.

I want to tell you that I’m afraid

that even now the sky is there, I still won’t make it. Have faith, runs circles across my mind.

This poem is also a love letter to the land itself—land that precedes the nation-state, that holds memory, that I love even as I fear the structures built on it. And I don’t think it offers any resolution, I just needed to hold the contradictions. That’s what I’ve learned to do, to hold two truths at once, to allow the complexity.

Doors are open

Thank you for reading.

With love,

Phoenix

x

P.S. I write a monthly newsletter for Worms Magazine ! Click here to subscribe to A Worm Moon 🪱 🌷

Thank you for reading.

With love,

Phoenix

x

P.S. I write a monthly newsletter for Worms Magazine ! Click here to subscribe to A Worm Moon 🪱 🌷