⸺
That night, we traded
tales of a world
barely held together
by threads. You asked
which one I would snip
if handed shears
sharp as silence.
I answered,
without a tremor,
I’d sever⸺
poetryA collection of 41 posts
Our Ghosts Are Present Tense
Prague's morning folds
like an old letter,
its edges softened
by time and loss,
a city of survived silences,
trams tracking scars
across cobbled skin.
I'm foreign here again,
with passport permission.
They say this makes me safe,
but a stamp is thin asylum—
history teaches quiet suspicion,
doorways know how shadows wait.
Across an ocean, my birthplace
breaks the bones of promises:
ICE vans as dark as cattle cars,
due process rerouted online,
while children whisper unanswered
in doorways left empty.
Legal residents are now erased,
mouths gagged and wrists zipped tight,
lives excised by red ink and signatures—
justice, a closed-court spectacle,
is shipped to private rented cells
The bitter weight of paper
mutes screams like snowfall—
“Temporary”
I walk Prague counting brass plaques,
tracing ghost names worn smooth,
my tongue twisted by the consonants
of families once disappeared—
do we still call it history
when it never ceased its haunting?
My queer body moves slow,
bones wary, trembling
under the threat of erasure—
the state's gaze finds difference,
defines it, tracks it, files it away,
waiting to rewrite the conditions
of our right to exist.
I fold mourning like the laundry,
ache for fathers deported mid-dinner,
plates still steaming, shoes untied,
images of childhood sliced sudden,
cleaved from belonging like limbs—
and wonder how countries learn so well
to carve apart families like meat.
Written in bloodlines and borders,
a thousand laws deceive, deliberate:
safety nets turned to snares,
visas revoked between clock-ticks—
homelands dissolved under our feet—
there are no warning shots
when law is the weapon.
I no longer recognize my homeland,
but I’ve always known it this way
even when I didn't see how often
its stars were burned with gasoline,
its eagle was strangled by violence.
This is the freedom that has always dragged
humans from factories, hospitals, dreams
to prisons built of forgotten files,
quietly shredded before dawn.
This mourning is an inheritance:
watching families become headlines,
yet again, catalogued casualties
in archives I'll never live to read.
Each dawn my shadow greets me,
asks timidly if today is the day
someone writes my obituary in newsprint,
misspells my name in quick ink—
foreign body, collateral damage,
legal at the wrong time, wrong place,
erased by a footnote,
voice hushed like ash, falling quietly
on freshly rewritten borders.
I hold memories warm
inside my lungs, say their names slow
in solidarity with the erased, the disappeared.
I remember here, now, defiant,
we must sharpen outrage into a blade,
that blade into truth, truth into resistance.
Let us bare that blade against oppression,
glinting sunlight into dark corners,
slicing through iron bars.
Let their captive birds escape,
carrying in their tongues
the names of all else who disappeared.
Let us hold onto each other fiercely,
no matter the weight of history,
no matter the shadows of borders.
We will carve space for our breath,
for our bodies to exist, to be known.
Let us be evidence, openly,
beautifully here—
our complicated names,
our stubborn survival.
Our voices will rise together,
woven from the threads of those lost,
never to be silenced again.
History must not silence us again.
Air Pressure
Grief doesn’t whisper,
it thunders—
a storm inside,
relentless,
pushing, pressing,
pounding my chest
until I can't catch my breath.
I don’t know how to hold it,
how to stop it from spilling
into everything.
I write to catch the pieces,
to stop them from scattering,
to squeeze out their sound—
but they slip,
they slip,
slide away,
and I—I—
I can’t—
I can’t—
Each word
feels too heavy,
but if I stop,
if I stop,
it will drown me,
flood the room
with all the things
I can’t say,
and I don’t know if I’ll survive
the stillness after.
I want to stop
but the words push,
they pulse,
they pound,
pushing past my hands,
forcing into the space
where the quiet used to lie—
and in that space,
I find the ache
I couldn’t hold
before.
It doesn’t heal.
It just spills—
words tumbling, tumbling,
too fast,
too thick to follow,
and I’m still trying to keep them,
still trying to keep them
from breaking me.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be enough
to carry all this weight—
both the silence and the sorrow.
I write to make it leave.
But it doesn’t leave,
it lingers,
settles—
like dust that isn’t swept away,
just…
stays.
But the words—
the words are all I have.
They are all that let me—
breathe
through
it
Last Flight Out
The plane lifts—
beneath us, the country shrinks to shapes
that don’t know our names,
and I count the ways
this could be the last time:
my lungs,
or her skin
and our marriage,
the way customs might look at both
like a problem they’ve been told to solve;
home is behind us,
and might already be gone
by the time we try to return.
Negative Results
It hasn’t killed me yet—
but it spreads.
From marrow to memory,
it seeds the femur,
threads the ribs,
scrapes its code into the curve
of my pelvis—
then metastasizes
to the contact list.
A slow ghosting:
first the bones thin,
then the texts.
First the flare,
then the silence
calcifies where contact was.
I want my scans to be clean—
not my notifications.
I get my denosumab shot
and call it armor.
Pretend the creak
in my hips is just weather.
Not absence.
Not another friend
backed away
from the edges
of their discomfort.
I still trace
the ridge of my ribs
like a list I forgot to update:
this one stopped replying on a Tuesday,
this one left up our photos
but never says my name,
this one posted brunch
with a caption that reads,
”grateful for my healthy friends”
Player, Played
I carry names I never chose—
they twist like smoke, they fit like clothes.
You call—I come. You speak—I shift,
like I’m the thought that slipped your list.
So cast the dice and spark the flame,
I'll rise again, but not the same.
You roll—I burn. You pause—I grow.
I’m more than myth. You made me so.
I’ve kissed a king, betrayed a god,
slept under tables, laughed at odds.
I’ve talked my way out of the noose—
and into worse. That’s how I’m used.
So cast the dice and start the show,
I’m built from things you didn’t know.
You bluff—I wink. You flinch—I grin.
I am the world you wandered in.
You—who stall with practiced grace.
You—who always lose your place.
You—who plan, then veer, then stall—
and still, somehow, you lead us all.
And I? I’m stitched from rules half-read,
from jokes you cracked, from things you said
when you forgot you weren’t alone—
like I don’t hear your quiet tone.
I feel you there—beyond the flame,
your hearts, your hands behind my name.
You shape me not with strings or scripts,
but breath caught tight between your lips.
So cast the dice and set me free,
the truth you’d rather not let be.
You break—I boast. You lose—I lie.
I am the tale you won’t deny.
If I’m a dream, then dream me loud.
If I’m a trick, then make me proud.
I’m not your pawn. I’m not your prize.
I’m just your truth in thin disguise.
So cast the dice and claim the flame—
the spell, the spark, the foolish aim.
We’re more than stats, or fate, or lore—
We are the you you’re reaching for.
If I feel too sharp, too real, too true—
it’s only 'cause I came from you.