Other Publications
I got me some birthday blues. Blues like sorrow. Blues like swimming pool. Blues like not swimming in a pool. Blues like drowning. Blues like lost at sea. Like sea. Like m/other memory don’t you know that every birthday I pass through takes me farther from you? From us?
“An abolitionist zine for and by adopted, fostered, and trafficked people.
It’s exactly what it sounds like.
This zine is an invitation for folks directly impacted by systems of family regulation, surveillance, and policing to gather our creative expressions and to know one another. In thinking about abolition we desire to be in relationship with, and draw connection to, other abolitionist and liberation movements.
The only theme is abolition.”
There is a responsibility to naming. A sacredness usually reserved, at first, to those that brought us into the world. But before that happens we are born title-less. I am sure of it. We are scrunched up infants that are some sort of something that is nothing until it is determined who we are in the utterance of a calling. And suddenly we are. it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
I wish someone told me that agony sometimes comes in the form of I and love and you and but. Yet here I am, a complete being in an uncompleted lifetime. (and I am trying to see it through)
There is not enough time in the day to write all of the eulogies that need to be written. But at least let me write my own just in case they kill me before I’m ready. They meaning the state, most specifically, the police. May my loved ones have more time to care for each other if they aren’t busy trying to find the words to sum up my life.
*I thought I had more time to say goodbye. So I wrote and addressed this to Sheila Roberts-Veatch to read while she was alive. I wish we had more years and I am profoundly thankful for the ones we had. Since she died before this could reach her, I am making this public. May she be carried onwards in these words and in our memories.
so they become what we call them
and we become how they view us
when they call us dead before we die
and we call them monsters.
“I study the history of a peoples I believe to be a part of through melanated ancestors but know to be other through colonized language. I am a stranger in my own history. Sifting through names and faces of people that look close enough to be kin but distant enough that I am sure I will never know. I examine traumas I have no business claiming and celebrate joy with a breadth of uncertainty. A part of the whole, it seems, but never wholly known.”
A breakup note to those that I love dearly who cannot separate themselves enough from whiteness to love me how I deserve.
“Maybe I was apprehensive to write this unbound in honesty because once I see it laid out I have to admit that I am ashamed that I love the white people in my life so much I’ve been willing to disrespect my own human need to express the truth behind my emotions just so they will keep me proximate.”
I grew up in private Christian schools 1st grade through 12th grade and struggled heavily with my sexuality and finding comfort in these spaces. Here are some windows into parts of this story.
I spent the night of the 2020 presidential election at the White House. It was electrifying. It was spiritual. Welcome into these memories.
In 2017 I had an arm injury that has changed my life forever. In this piece I use my arm and my chronic pain, search for healing as a means to bridge the gap I have with white people in conversations about race. It is a look inside healing and a statement on grace.
In August 2020 I started writing for a Medium.com publication called BALDWIN.
Here is my first column.
The Girl From The Airport
In June, 2019, Crystal Dunn of the USA women’s soccer team wrote a personal essay in The Player’s Tribune and described the day we met in an airport. I wrote a response that got published shortly after.