my favorite job

One of my favorite jobs (before I formally became a teacher) was to pilot a restorative justice program for youth. I wrote about my time in that role as it helped me to see a future without police, prisons, and jails more clearly.

My favorite job was seeing the future. 

From 2013 to 2016 I worked as a restorative justice practitioner piloting an out-of-system referral program for youth who would have otherwise faced incarceration. It was my job to lead young people through processes that centered speaking openly about harm, confronting harmful behavior(s), and making amends through actions called for by those who were impacted.

The project worked like this: a young person was arrested, their case went to the juvenile DA, there was a randomized process to determine whether the case went to our RJ program or to court. If it was sent to RJ we made contact with the young person and their family to gauge their interest in the program. If it aligned 1) they were in fact the person who caused the harm 2) they were willing to claim responsibility for the harm 3) they were willing to make amends with those impacted. Upon completion of the program no charges would be filed and the case would be closed out of court.

Here’s the larger context: The United States (and other countries, but really the US) has prisons and jails for kids. Kids can’t go to a dentist appointment on their own but they can be thrown into jail. Kids can’t go to certain movies without a parent but they can go to jail. This fact is known by people walking around in the world but the cognitive dissonance is very similar to that of people’s relationship to prisons and jails for adults: centered on the question ‘well what did they do?’ as if considering this justifies why anyone could be rightfully isolated from their family and community, and have their freedom and autonomy to be a human taken away. Prisons and jails for kids hide directly in our faces. In San Francisco the big building where kids are locked up is on a hill directly across the street from my old high school. Some kids get to go to school and some kids go to jail. The jail was modeled based on an adult jail downtown.

I approached this restorative justice work knowing that incarceration as a young person increases your chances of adult incarceration because of the grip and surveillance of carceral systems. I grew up with security guards in my schools. In middle school after speaking back to a white teacher, I was told to stand outside the door of my classroom. In high school, I was made to wait outside the closed door of my first period classroom until my white teacher felt like opening it, if I arrived late. Other white teachers said my name wrong on purpose and asked me to read extensive passages rather than calling on other students to read after me. In response to this, I acted in: negative self-talk. self-doubt and gaslighting. becoming mutable to fit in with my white peers. 

While I worked in the restorative justice program, I noticed that the young people being sent to participate after being arrested where youth who acted-out by replicating the harm that was caused to them onto other people. Many of the cases I received were considered felony level crimes by definition of the law. But in RJ we didn’t think about behaviors as ‘crime’. We discussed behaviors in terms of the harm they caused. The distinction is important because it is a divestment from punitive legal language that marks youth for the rest of their lives.  

While I had day-to-day tasks like writing case notes or meeting with youth and their families, I was committed to the larger work of placing agency to heal back into the hands of communities. Since the establishment of the courts, prosecutors, police, and judges have choked our collective ability to grow through conflict resolution and transformative justice by intervening and taking center stage. We see this happening in formalized ways like trials where documents say ‘insert young person’s name’ vs. the State of California. Although this is considered normal the perspective is hugely problematic. Like, if I don’t have what I need to survive and I stole something so that I could sell it to buy necessities, what does that have to do with the state? Isn’t this between me and whatever establishment or person I took from? But the state sees it as “you broke MY law so you will PAY me by sitting in my jail. You will pay me with your life. You will pay me with time that you will never get back. I will punish you by making you work for pennies on the dollar, taking you away from your family and your community. Etc.”

In cases of harm, this framing (of young person’s name vs. the state) also takes agency away from folks who have endured harm. The state rushes in to punish youth as a means to get their funding for filled beds that there is no room for folks who were impacted to say, “Actually, jail time for this young person has nothing to do with me and it’s not what I want. I just need to know why they did it. I want them to promise they won’t do it again. And I want my stuff back.” 

RJ conferences were a place where we came up with solutions that were called for by the impacted parties which included those directly harmed or impacted, community members, family members, and the young people themselves. 

Many of the cases we dealt with included physical harm. 

Some youth were forthcoming about physically harming the other person. Other youth needed time or were afraid and reluctant to admit that they have done something that impacted someone else. Afraid that admitting to the behavior would lead to punishment and/or that they were being tricked. It made me ask--when and where can young people own up to their mistakes and not be thrown away? Not be tricked or punished for telling the truth? Where can young people be seen as whole humans who make mistakes and make amends?

Restorative justice does this to a degree. But transformative justice is one of the only spaces I know that creates that container. 

There were many hard parts to that job. The hardest part was seeing young people willing to be transformed but NOBODY and NOTHING ELSE IN SOCIETY being willing to mirror that change to create better options and conditions for these youth. Another hard part was when youth were willing to be transformed in their understanding and embodiment of empathy, honesty, and responsibility/accountability but THEIR PARENTS were not able to embody that for them and in turn sabotaged the process by insisting on punishment of the youth because that’s what they were most familiar with. 

The onus of change and transformation without change in conditions, access, or autonomy for young people is gaslighting. It’s a violence. Young people see the ways the world works. They see that responsibility is for some and not for others. To act as if this is not the case is another form of harm. It is difficult to hold these realities in the same hand: You caused harm and you must make it right to be in right-relationship with community and yourself. WITH The world has caused harm to you and nobody has been held accountable for that. 

I held those things in the balance by telling the truth. By not pretending that a young person’s behavior exists in a vacuum. I held these things by validating the fear of being thrown away and committing to do my best to support their freedom. I held these things by committing to the future I want to create, which might look small in the context of this large, unjust raggedy world. I held these things by knowing that freedom as a young person is central and important and they deserve better options.

Each of us is stunted when the law intervenes. Each of us has the potential for a bigger imagination, a bigger chance at feeling justice. A better chance at healing when we hold these things together. 

It can be messy. It can be ugly. It can be awkward. It can be uncomfortable. It can be scary. Because for many of us it is new. For many of us, telling the truth about something we are ashamed of makes us feel like death. But when we try to build the container for that unknowing and discomfort, we also invite the deep knowing and the potential for freedom from shame and fear on the other side. I want this for all of us.

my job

Earlier this month I read in-person for the first time in a very long time. I wrote about my job as a teacher at City College of San Francisco. I read alongside other teachers, poets, and workers under the banner of worker power and solidarity.

City College of San Francisco has been under attack. When I wrote and read this piece, HUNDREDS of faculty were being faced with layoffs and a host of classes in departments that mean the most to us were dangling precariously in the balance if they were not wiped out altogether. After countless hours of organizing and bargaining a tremendous win was gained and all pink slips have been rescinded. We will continue to fight to preserve a free, community-based learning place at CCSF.

'my job'

my job is to fight for a future where my students don't have to be heartbroken by minimum wage. where capitalism stops stealing our dreams and reselling us our own ideas with tax.

i want my students to have a future where wage theft is talked about like a horror story around a campfire, whiterabbitwhiterabbit.

i want a future where my students don't have to work to eat. Don't have to be the best at something to be treated humanely.

my job is to find language and give words for our most intimate experiences of ourselves.

my job is to see the future--to see it clearly and breathe life into it. so, i see my students graduating. i see them smiling and pulling their tassels one side to another. i see them holding their babies on their hips. i see their mother's holding their diplomas.

i see them blocking traffic and business as usual in defense of each other. i see them having the right words at the right moment.

sometimes i just see them doing nothing and this is a luxury and delight i hold them in for as long as i can.

every teacher i have loved, loved me back at eye-level. poured into me with a soft but heavy hand. saw me. saw me growing and saw me fist fighting a system bigger than all of us. saw me resting and writing. and made me possible. made my fight possible.

i am made from the magic of teachers who saw me in the future and who refused to see a future without me.

my job is to carry forward this lineage. to reach back and pull forward a song. to let the words fly out of my mouth and to revel in the sounds of all the voices joining in around me.

Writing is time travel

Writing is time travel

I have traveled through time to give myself the loving forgiveness I needed.

Writing is a portal 

To other worlds I don’t believe I have access to until I write them down.

When I was 12 it was a funny voice box that I put my mother’s regurgitated demon voices into and made into something that got to have a life outside of her. Outside of my fear for her. Writing is an exorcism.

Writing has taught me that what I know to be true is what I know to be true.

It has frightened me realizing that others inside of me, beside, behind, and just over my head have things they want to say on my page. Writing is a duty.

I’ve never seen my ego so swollen and puffed up and shining. I’ve never seen it more bruised. 

Writing is a mirror. When I move through the world all day absorbing the thoughts, gestures, and feelings of others I come home and take my jacket off and sigh, ah yes, this is me. Still. Thank god. 

Writing gave my sensitivity a job. As a child, I knew things I didn’t know I knew. I was already a survivor, a big thing adjusting to a small body that was forgetting more and more all the time. I could stay very still and quiet and know what each tone of silence meant. I could sense things coming into the light from an out of focus place based on the tones of voices two hours before a meltdown. I knew what everyone needed before they knew they needed it. I was obsessed with things being okay because they seldom were. I was nostalgic before I was old enough to be nostalgic. The flecks of familial survival were on me like freckles. On the long, dark days of my mother’s depressive episodes I would stare at photos of people in my family who were still alive and just cry because I missed them. I wanted to be outside. I wanted to be somewhere alive. I was, and sometimes still am, upset by tiny details. Strip malls and suburbs make me incredibly sad and hopeless. Writing allows a site to transmute everything I think and feel. Writing called everything I saw and felt in my hyper-vigilant state ‘a gift’. An “ear for dialogue” or “attention to detail” or “character development”. I learned people to keep myself safe. I learned patterns before I could get myself out of them. But writing gave me power. It gave me perspective and permission to make up new possibilities I wanted to feel, make up feelings I wanted other people to feel with me. It allowed me to tell some stories in ways I wished they’d happened and others in ways I wouldn’t wish on anyone, not ever. 

Writing gave me attention I so wanted and needed. I wrote my first story in 1st grade, in Ms. Buted’s class. It was about a lion in the circus--that’s all I remember. Our classroom was in a bungalow conjoined by an accordion divider to another classroom. I don’t remember my deskmate. But I remember when Ms. Buted asked me about the story--she had a look of surprise and joy in her face and it was about me. About something I wrote. That year in Ms. Buted’s class was probably the year I remember most of any of my primary education years. I know this because we had at least two different classrooms and I have a handful of memories in both. I remember the guest talk we had on ‘smoking’ when one of the smallest kids in class answered the question correctly of what second hand smoke was. I remember El Nino ripping through the electricity of the school in our second floor classroom and watching the winds blow the trees through the large ceiling window of our building lining up against the wall. I remember my friend crying because she lost her mother. She was my desk mate one of those days and I remember how proud I felt to have clean tissue in my pocket, which Ms. LeJender made all of us carry in our pockets before leaving for school. I remember getting the speaking part in our school skit “Hey Black Child,” I remember how terrified I was to speak in front of everyone and how I so wanted to speak in front of everyone. I remember failing to deliver my lines after being prompted to twice in front of the cafeteria turned auditorium of my entire school. 

Writing later gave me clues about my life and who I was in comparison to the lives of others. Recognizing other people’s shame--in their body language, in what they wanted to draw my attention to. What people hid from me or lied to me about made me curious about what I looked like to them. Our shared shame about certain things made us the same class identity sometimes. Other times the absence of other’s shame or refusal of shame gave me a high horse which I rode home and looked at all my nice things on. As a child similarities were found in what our mothers said ‘no’ to us about when we asked, if we were spanked or whooped (and how we were spanked or whooped). In my house if my sister got in trouble, we both got spanked. There was no solo-whooping in our house. I believe it was an attempt to create ‘fairness’ but it only made us deeper anti-allies. As a child differences were found in whether or not we were embarrassed by items of clothing or crust on our faces, or how we smelled as a reflections of the smells of our own houses. I took all of this in then despite not yet having the language for it. 

Writing taught me joy(?) I’m not sure this is true but therapy helped a lot. Writing did push me to ask about the miracle of options, though. Sometimes I teach a lesson on joy. I ask folks if they’ve ever read a book that moved them to tears--a sad scene, the death of a character, etc. and most folks raise their hands. Then I ask folks if they’ve ever read a book or a story that moved them to joy, just manic and dizzy with joy. A lot fewer folks raise their hands--some folks raise their hands halfway because they’re almost sure they have, they just can’t recall exactly when or which book but give them a moment. Writing joy has been my biggest challenge. To write about joy I have to experience it. I have to embody it--whether foreign or at home within me. And preferably I have to embody it multiple times and relatively deeply if I want it to be contagious when I write it. But how to do this when joy is corny? Stupid? “Cognitive dissonance”? Missing perspective? Inaccessible to others? Written about wrongly? Experienced wrongly as not actual joy because actual joy is… 

How do you write about joy when everything inside you sees it as a vulnerable state that puts you in danger of harsh critique, abandonment, simpleton making? How do you write about joy when you are the one who is miserable and anticipating all of the comments and critiques of other miserable people on the internet? You try. If there is anything I know about writing. It is this: when I stick my hand out, I am apprehensive nearly every time--thinking maybe it’s really stopped this time because I’ve been away so long. And I’m kicking myself because really this was ridiculous and before I know it someone and something warm reaches out for me too. And I am relaxed into this familiarity once again. With gratitude. 

With writing I am reminded that I have a home somewhere else. Many somewhere elses. Real homes in the mind palace of my past. There are always places where I belong. I want this for all of us. 

****I need to create and share art to process. I make it and sometimes I put it out half baked because I need to practice feeling comfortable with my ass hanging out. Because I need to practice remembering that the standard for creation doesn’t have to be so based in finality, completion, perfection. I need to create and share in order to trust that people will make their own decisions about what they choose to read. If they don’t like it, they can scroll on. We each have a choice about what we consume and I am challenging myself to spend more time with what resonates, what connects. When I put myself on a high seat, whether to critique my own work or another’s, I can’t create. The stakes are too high. I’m being hard on others and even harder on myself. Perfection does not exist. I embrace that. I lower those impossible stakes. I give myself permission to try in the field of vision of others. Misery is natural but sometimes only one option.

A Series of Hard, Unfinished Inside Thoughts

I become myself over and over again by sacrifice(s)

I trade my depression for mania

I weather thoughts with a raggedy shield that looked so much more appropriate in a different light

I listen to people who know nothing and say so

I listen to people who know nothing and say they know everything

I move through euphoria of knowledge about everything

I am destroyed by how little I am and how little I know

I am embarrassed by everything I’ve ever done before bed and randomly in the shower

I watch people’s babies be born and take their first steps on the internet

I talk to myself and answer back and am terrified by old fears that formerly looked smaller in a different light

I listen to books on tape and lose things I just had in my hands

I reflect on everything I’ve loved and imagine never having it in my hands again

I am grateful as a weapon to ward off misfortune

I guard myself like a body that has fallen and has been identified by buzzards who are relentless and wanting to pull my flesh away from the bone

I go to church in nature and the sound of my own voice is so droll i don’t realize it is my own

coming out from under my mask

responding to a conversation that happened over a decade ago

I find little mementos from past selves and want to remember everything 

Build altars to the small self that is still responding to emails on time

And clinging to what ifs as a means to avoid abandonment

She reaches out to the world and none of the hands that reach back have a firm grasp

I am sad for her

My plants grow so boisterously that I mistake the green as confidence of my own and bring another plant into my house, a more sophisticated one with fungus gnats

And they tear through the soil of my well potted life

Haunt my dreams

Fly in my face while I teach to all the tiny people on my screen

I wonder what their houses look like outside of the frames

I feel the euphoria of performance when I see their heads nodding, their little smiles

I am broken when I can’t answer their smug questions

I feel the exhaustion of performance

It is orgasmic to have answers to smug questions

All of my fruit spoils and sometimes my flowers last for two weeks on my altar without fresh water

Washing laundry gives me the feeling of getting away with stealing and the laugh that fist fights it’s way up my throat scares me 

I hope no one else hears it and thinks that I think life is okay even for this little moment

I fear laughter is an omen that something bad will happen

I check my symptoms against a too bright computer screen

I have all the diagnoses 

I remake myself in the image of Black femmes who were wicked and needed no one and I have nowhere to go with my new attitude but the internet

When i am feeling completely alone, unlovable and broken

It makes me feel like I have a choice

Like living this way is a lifestyle

I dress up in clothes to go nowhere

Don’t want to wash my face

Do want to apply sparkles to it

Pursuit of perfection is killing us and 

Everyday i forget.

I do my best and it's never good enough

I become a mean principal terrorizing the single pupil in the school, me

Have I always been this way?

All Gays Go to Heaven published in Mala Forever's Pride Edition "Pulp Dreams"

I wrote a personal essay about my Uncle Rodney to honor and celebrate him this Pride season in a way that he was most likely not able to be seen and celebrated during his lifetime. I’m so grateful for his spirit and that we were able to pass each other under the veil. The essay, along with other FANTASTIC work by other LGBTQIA2+ artists is available here on Mala Forever’s site (link in title).

RADAR Productions' GLOW June Poetry Feature

Me and my work were featured for Radar Productions’ blog, GLOW, as a highlighted artist for the month of June: https://www.radarproductions.org/blog/glow-queer-poetry-feature-tanea-lunsford-lynx

capitol + broad

I was asked by the SFMoMA to write a piece and have it featured as a permanent exhibit in their parking garage. The title of the poem I wrote, Capitol & Broad, is rendered on a wall along with a short excerpt of the poem. The full length poem is also up on their website in their online journal, Open Space. Capitol & Broad is an intersection in Lakeview, a neighborhood in San Francisco where my family has been for several generations. My parents were raised there and I grew up there.

https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2019/06/floor-3-capitol-broad/

'music is a miracle'

https://www.argotmagazine.com/first-person-and-perspectives/music-is-a-miracle

myplace

In January I took part in the RADAR ‘Show Us Your Spines’ residency at the San Francisco Public Library. Over the course of the month in the library I got to read, watch, touch, and visit with ephemera created by and for Black queer people. Among these were the letters between Pat Parker & Audre Lorde, a short documentary called ‘T’ain’t Nobody’s Business’, and Cheryl Dunye’s early works. I wrote this piece after watching ‘T’ain’t Nobody’s Business’ wherein a historian talks about a police raid that ended one of Ma Rainey’s queer house parties where the cast of her show, predominately Black women would join together and dance around to music together in her living room (clothed and unclothed, lol). I read this piece in February at the residents reading in the Hormel Center at the Main Library. 

                                                               myplace

 The Castro has never been my place because it isn’t packed with people who have felt pride in smelling clean. People who have known the satisfying smell of hair grease and hot iron. It’s not full of people who forget to cover their mouths when they laugh and who remember to leave a lil’ meat on the bone in mixed company. There aren’t enough people there who had to wear a different outfit than the one they’re wearing now, just to get out of the house. 

I’ve explored all of the Castro’s dark corners and only found myth. No magic. No deep flavor bursting in the middle of a bite. This place has never been mine, but when I get a white lover, the magic of the Castro glows a little brighter only momentarily when we stand close enough together. 

 Where is that place where Blackness and queerness are celebrated at the same time? Is it only in this body at this moment?

 I’m looking for a place where the walls sweat and someone notices the nuances in my gender expression and nods or grunts in agreement. 

 Where this story is true: I’ve always been gay. Even at eighteen, being dropped off at The Crib[1] by my straight boyfriend. 

 Where this story is also true: My queerness is Black. My queerness is growing up no the same block, so we cousins. 

 I lust deeply for that place where the song drops and it feels all at once like 1997 in my mother’s heels, pretending that I’m going out to the club with her and simultaneously it feels like 2008 having lust dreams about a frenemy and also it feels like 2013 when I find myself in a mouth that looks just like mine. 

In myplace I see myself spinning spinning spinning to Minnie Ripperton’s high notes alongside my Uncle Rodney, who has to marry his mother’s friend’s daughter for citizenship before sneaking out of the backdoor of the house to go out dancing with his boyfriend. In myplace we meet eyes when he walks into the door and we’re holding each  other’s faces and laughing and admiring each other’s afros, despite his having been dead just months before I was born.

 In myplace people dance close despite sweat and are conscious of joy leaning on the bar. Wrap arms around the necks of their lovers and neighbors and dance partners in awe of their ability to show this love without shame, without dying, without being white. 

 In myplace I’m walking the category of “mostly newly recovered from trauma and figuring it all out” and there are 10-10-10-10-10s across the board.

 In myplace my identity is not a trauma[1]. I am not a sore. I am not an injury. In myplace this life, this body is not a sentence that we have to make the best of. There’s a wildness and a cunningness and lovelovelove too big for this body—so I carry it on the top of my head in a basket. Make coats out of it. Pull it along in a wagon to hand out to people on the street like ice cream on warm days. 

In this place, myplace, when the disco ball turns. When the street car dings outside. When the theater lights buzz up and the bass beats through the walls, it is all for us.

 This is the place that was made for you and me: Kingdom of shea butter and oxtails. Bay leaves and Murray’s. Duct tape and cashmere. Durags and bonnets. Bring me all of your cries—sopranos to barrotones and all of you in the middle. There is a place for us and there’s no pattywagon waiting out front once the lights come up inside. And there is no bitter DJ playing dubstep mixes of Whitney Houston.

 Myth has it, that ever since myplace was even a languid dream oscillating between the heads of two lovers, it’s been a place the cops have tried to shut down. And they wasn’t even late on the rent at that point. They say two cold lovers were spooning for life in a twin bed and their heads were so close together that they had the same dream. They dreamt of myplace. 

 Myplace started off as someone’s grandmother’s living room. They’d move the couches out and hide the silver and open the doors after midnight. The big women and their big voices would come in their suits and ties, their petticoats and layers of dresses, their press n’ curls, their matted underhats. It was a place where the wicked took deep pleasure at the rest of the world’s fear of them. Where the basic-asses would leave them the hell alone—to read and dance and make music and smoke and sing all night ending in deep solemness with the stringy yellow sun rising. Needless to say, there were a few failed séances. A few broken tables. Missing shoes. Food and body odor that could make you giggle into your handkerchief. It was myplace. 

 It was myplace then and it’s myplace now, despite whatever new name they have for it. Despite the new wallpaper and the dingy cover over the jukebox. And whoever they put behind the bar these days. I have friends from gradeschool in the bathroom line and at least one former lover in each room pretending we’re okay as friends again this year. 

 When the children come down from their beds into the bar, all of us auntles and unkies misty eye over them growing up right before our eyes and point out the locations of their parents, maybe they’re dancing in circles to Donna Summer or getting out a new black trashbag for the garbage from underneath the sink. 

 Over the lights and the music the child is cared for at eye level. Is kissed on the head and ushered back to bed. This is myplace. 

 Myplace. The daytime eyesore selling cheese grits for hangovers on football Sundays. 

 There’s a botanica in the back and a love spell with your name on it. More lit candles in tubs of water than I can count and a beaded curtain leading out to the back porch to the smoking yard with the broken down gazebo, where the lovers got married all those years ago.  

When they first began letting outsiders in, they came with their film rolling and their short writing pads full of pages and pages of questions. They wanted to know what we thought about politics, who we voted for, insisted on how hard our plight was despite having not lived it. But nobody had the nerve to fix their pen or their mouth to ask about the joy we cultivated by pulling it down in particles through the thick air. Nobody asked about the endless soultrain line where it was always almostyour turn. Nobody asked about all the great loves of our lives we found and re-found on the back porch. I think part of it was that they couldn’t feel it like we could. They couldn’t feel us, like we could. And that’s how we’d known (for the millionth time, really) that we had built something special. Something that would outlive all of us. Something that could never die. 

[1]The Crib was a very messy but babygay cute 18+ queer club event that took place at City Nights (also lovingly referred to as Shitty Nights) in San Francisco.

[2] In the first version of this work, this line read: ‘in myplace injury is not the center of my identity.’ Inspired by an essay I read during my residency called ‘The Whiter the Bread, The Quicker You’re Dead’ by Allison Reed found inNo Tea, No Shade(an anthology). The essay explores white queer theory and the centering queer white identity as an ‘injury’ that perpetuates violent erasure(s) particularly of racism and classism. I replaced this line with a more descriptive one because without this very specific context (of Reed’s essay), the line reads as ableist.

5 shows i want to see on TV

1) A queer love story centering two Black women that has an engaging plot line that exists beyond coming-out to the world and/or their families. Queer people in the show are played by people who are queer in real life. In the show it would be preferable if one or both of them were raised broke and are adjusting to having money. In the reboot, maybe their expressions of stud-ness and femme-ness are renegotiated, but in Season One it’s perceivably a stud-femme relationship. Maybe one of them is a T.A. in grad school who is in a battle to reclaim stolen intellectual property (or a patent!) from someone with more power and notoriety. The other struggles to preserve the rights of sex workers by organizing fellow dancers at her club to open their own womanist strip club. The scenes portraying the love of the two main characters are not performed for the male gaze. There is a range of sensuality and sexuality that is not created for juxtaposition to straightness—it just is. There are contradictions and messiness in their relationship roles. They struggle with things like finding new friends, having separate lives/not using the singular “we”, trying to figure out if they’re a poly couple, interrogating why their doctors don’t listen to them about their bodies, questioning how to actually raise a child without assigning them a gender, and feeling like the oldest people at queer parties in their city even though they’re only in their late twenties. Maybe one of them has an incredible sense of smell and the other has a habit of holding her lover’s face in her hands and asking with genuine curiosity, “what are you thinking about?” There will be plenty of scenes of them doing normal ass things in their own way—detangling an afro from the end to the root in front of an open laptop on Sundays, calling a mama to make sure that the recipedoes actually call for the amount of butter she said the first time, dumping water from the dehumidifier, being referred to as ‘friends’ at certain holiday gatherings with family elders, bumming a cigarette when drunk, grinding teeth at night, talking about the ‘hit or miss’ nature of acupuncture, and the joy of getting either of their names pronounced correctly in public by others on the first try. When they have sex, the camera does not preemptively turn or fast-forward or shy away. Extra points if there is more than one episode showing how they fell in love. Extra extra points if the show doesn’t end with them breaking up and/or if the show goes on, continuing to feature them both as they heal after they separate. 

2) A “this is what it used to be” documentary-type show that tours historically Black neighborhoods now suffering from gentrification across the United States. The show unearths the histories of fantastic, normal-ass Black people who used to live there. Episodes will include: San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle, Austin, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Harlem, and Washington D.C. Weekly episodes would be one hour long and feature historians as well as relatives of people who used to live in communities that are now predominately white and upper middle class. Semi-famous black folks with roots in these neighborhoods or memories of growing up there would be featured every now and then talking about how the Blackness of that place inspired their work. Anti-gentrification organizers and long-time residents would be centered on the shows as a means to connect the struggles of each city. Parts of the show would feature segments of former Black residents responding to/interacting with the current absurdity of the gentrified community (i.e. the San Francisco episode would feature my grandmother walking through what used to be Fillmore stopping into each of the shops declaring, ‘Oh another one!’ as she crosses the threshold into another specialty sock/backpack/travel supply shop, close-up on her face as she learns what boba is and folds it out of her mouth discreetly into a napkin, close-up on her snatching her glasses off angrily as she looks at the price tags on monochromatic clothing in chic stores on Valencia Street close to where the projects used to be, or follow her while she is touring a newly built studio priced at a million dollars overlooking the water and ruins of the old PG&E plant down the street from where she grew up—when she says, ‘I never thought I’d see the day when…’ you can hear the echo bouncing off the ceiling through the empty building).

3) A semi-sci-fi show that follows kids who have survived trauma into their adulthoods as they realize that they’ve gained ‘superpowers’. After being the caretaker to one of her parents, one kid (much like Octavia Butler’s Lauren Olamina) develops the power of hyper-empathy, wincing and aching whenever someone close to her is in physical or emotional pain. Another kid, after surviving a traumatic experience, develops a sixth sense of sorts, being able to anticipate at any given moment the possibility of what could go terribly wrong—he’s only right half the time. Another kid can read people’s minds and adjust himself based on their perceptions of him, thus gaining the trust of adults and popularity and acceptance of others in his class, despite not being able to do so in his home with his family of origin. Each of these kids grows, not fully recognizing their relationship to their gifts until they’re adults and run ragged by the constant maintenance they require (whether through self-medicating, somatic therapy, or thrill seeking). They balance courage and fear of healing the wounds that created their superpowers, afraid of who they will be if the wounds close, afraid that their gifts are the only things that make them who they are. Each time they embody a positive coping mechanism without losing themselves, they develop new superpowers that exist outside of their wounds, with no strings attached. In Season 4, after healing, they struggle with the new obstacle of boredom.  

4) An avant-guard-ish show that tests the limits of camera work by way of centering on a protagonist who has chronic anxiety. The camera seems to act as a vexing fruit fly—getting too close to the face of the protagonist during anxiety attacks, or hovering at a weird angle overhead in the shower when shame pounces on them through the recollection of a distant memory of something they did once a long time ago, or sitting on their chest as they try to breathe deeply to get to sleep (despite insomnia) at night. We accompany our protagonist in their odd message dreams and in their delusions, as the world turns sideways after self-medicating with psychedelics. Our protagonist begins asking, then interviewing people in their family of origin about ‘feelings’. They begin to trace ‘the feelings’ back as far as the oldest person in their family can remember. In a dream they receive a message from an ancestor instructing them how to heal themselves and several generations of ancestors too. They struggle to believe what’s been shared with them and battle with the implications of what they must do. 

5) A series that follows several plotlines unfolding at one intersection in a city. In the show, often times our vantage point is a bus stop or a corner liquor store or a fried chicken spot or just a place where old heads sit and watch the day go by (with or without a domino table or a chess/checker board). While the camera may move around to the three other corners of the intersection, zooming, focusing, straying, or looking over it’s own shoulder, everything we see, hear or need to know (or don’t need to know), happens at the corner. There are holes in backgrounds of the plot, half-told stories, vigils, and all kinds of news shared on the one corner. The show plays with the limitation(s) and fullness of looking out at the world from one single place. 

Still Here

I wrote and performed this piece for Still Here VI: Existence as Resistance, a show featuring queer Black San Franciscans. This show was part of the National Queer Arts Festival and was the first I've ever curated. I prepared for the show in the community of fellow artists, performers, and loved ones--it was a labor of absolute love and pleasure and hope for Black folks in my city. I really really love us. 

Still Here

I used to live here

My whole hood a museum now. and my whole city a playground with rules against me.

This used to be a good place for a young witch to practice raising hell with two too-small hands

A place for getting on the back of the bus without paying and still feeling dignified shouting BACK DOOR. 

This used to be a good place to be nobody. To hide from the too-rough fingers of the world under thick fog until you caught your breath and could run again. Or so I'm told. By the time we got here four generations ago all the good hiding spots for catching your breath were taken or we wasn't allowed to buy. 

You used to be able to find a lost aunty in the TLs who told good stories and forgot which secrets were who's

You used to could dream about life as a low rider and a Black cowboy here

My mama didn't speak Spanish but sometimes she wasn't talking to Pepe's mama because Pepe’s mama, who we all thought was Selena reborn, took our clothes out of the dryer when she was impatient. And sometimes they was best friends on late Sunday night washes.

You used to could have lil’ baby dreams and get the best directions from a man nodding off while standing up

You used to could get your fortune told by the man in front of the liquor store who had been revived from death twice for the price of one loose Newport

You used to be able to have all hands on deck after watching a loved one fall off the wagon. Again. And again.  

---

I'm 17 years old when My boo and I have matching Jordan's and matching North Faces zipped up to our chins. We kick out the red ‘stop request’ signs on the M train and put them on a necklace and wear them like a prize. 

The first time going into the tunnel at West Portal I thought I was so big I crouched my neck into my shoulders so as not to bump my head and I was transformed into someone who was from here.

There is an entire microcosm of a dark world ruled by 2nd grade teachers in the tunnels between West Portal and Van Ness station. I have seen it with my own eyes.

It ain't even a Blondies downtown no more. 

Where are all the black & brown children in this city?                                                           Somewhere being treated like extinction.

They dug up our bones when they turned over the dirt in them projects where Anthony's granny used to live. It's a high rise now. With the best views any building built on black back bones could build. 

Or so they say.                                                                                                                                  they won't let me up to see the view. 

----

My head fell off while running to catch the 54 again today

It’s an anniversary. I remember missing the bus like this when I went home to my great grandmother, a famous mustard seed. She sewed my head back onto my neck again and sang me her famous mustard seed song called "girl you ain't got no options." She sang it in the panic soprano falsetto voice, the one in the key of "this house just won't burn down will it?" The one in the pitch of tired 24 hour Safeway light.

And it was soothing. 

Besides having two girlfriends named Monique with several children each my father assures me that I am the cutest cute that ever cuted. Until one day I am nine and I get my hair permed and my thick locks become a whisper in the shadow of what they used to be. And my head feels too light. Without saying so with his mouth, I have become an adult and he stops coming to pick me up on Saturdays.

I used to live here

Several leagues beneath the sand and sea at Ocean Beach where people are burning out fog machines to keep the attraction going, there is another layer of alternate reality, a universe where I can’t find parking anywhere in the Mission

And the light goes out at my grandmother’s old house but none of us live there

And the house with our multi-generational miracle in it is nearly up to 1 million dollars on Zillow tumbling profit as it gets bought and sold every year

And I see people whose singing voices made me cry with joy lying in the street with no shoes on

And I’m losing teeth in all my dreams

I used to live here

Before my sister had the baby and summer returned in September in time to celebrate. When Cesar Chavez was Army street and I only knew one Portrero Hill and there was no pizza or dog walking there.

Before NoPa.

When we couldn’t be queer so we had to really enjoy our Halloweens in the Castro. When the Metreon was still new and the fast slide in Yerba Buena gardens was the top of the world and downtown was a Friday activity brought to you in part by a long paper transfer or a pass with a Y on it.

I know hood and hippy talk. I know “ain’t”. I know hyphy and gumbo. I know that you don’t have to get out of the car to enjoy the view but the wind has magic in it. I know that nobody puts their feet in the water but there's a blessing just for me.

I used to live here and I’m coming back for all my shit.

I’m coming back for all our shit.

 All of our after BART stops running shenanigans.

All of our heart to hearts around Lake Merced a million times. After all the little things we got away with stealing at Stonestown. After our standing in line for Jordans and driving our mother’s car without licenses and being curious about the significance of why Tuesday at 12?

I am coming back for our San Francisco whether or not they let me across the bridge.

I want to see it up close. I want to see us upclose.

I want to meet all of our mothers hanging out the windows looking left and right for us to come barreling down the blocks when it’s time to come home.

I want this for all of us.

I want it to be how it was when I used to live here. 

Policia Militar

I heard the revving of the engine as we walked in front of his car. When I startled and looked into the front window, he stared directly back at me. He had dead eyes and a snarled lip. He was wearing a full Brazilian military police uniform. It made him look bulky and crammed in the driver’s seat. 

We were crossing the cobblestone street near our hotel, behind the taxi we arrived in and in front of the unmarked car containing the police officer. His bright headlights struck us, making our clothes white as we crossed. The moment we were out of the periphery of his car, he sped off down the one-way street. 

It was a warm night. We were returning from Porto da Barra Beach where we ran into the dancers from an Afro-Brazilian folkloric dance showcase we had seen the night before. Our delegation of Black folks had filled the entire front row of the theater. At the end of the performance, when we gave a standing ovation hooping and hollering, I turned around briefly and noticed that the entire audience behind us calmly clapping in their seats, was white. The performers called out to us when they recognized us on the beach the next day. We proceeded to visit and laugh together for hours--them speaking no English, us speaking no Portuguese. In the cab back to the place where we were staying (a former colonial convent, turned hotel), I’d asked our cab driver the question that had been lingering on my mind since the night we arrived. Riding into Salvador, I saw several graffiti markings that held enough similarities to words in Spanish that I understood. A rough translation said, “someone was killed here by PM”. 

                                 “What is ‘PM’?”

In retrospect, I could have anticipated the answer based on context clues. I was still filled with terror by his response,

                   “Police Military, Military Police”

I felt goose bumps raise up on my scalp and the beginnings of a tension headache rearing at the base of my neck as we rounded the tight corner at the bottom of the hill near our hotel.

There was a deep quiet in the car as the reality set in for each of us hearing the answer to the question about “PM”. Before long I began to spiral into questions about the military police: How many of the boarded-up houses had I seen on the narrow, winding roads with this message on the front? How many people passed the words each day as a warning and reminder? How many people saw the graffiti and remembered their neighbors? How long had the houses been left that way, un-lived in and closed up and boxed off (filled with the too-soon-dead ghosts of families?) Who all died? Were there children? 

                                        ………..

Brazil was the last place in the Americas to abolish slavery (in 1888). Slavery lasted there for about 300 years and worked to terrorize more than 4 million African people brought to the country as slaves.

Brazil’s current population is estimated at 209.29 million people.

Based on the 2010 census (when the population was 190.7 million people), more than half of the population identified as Black or ‘Brown’. Brazil’s census addresses ethnicity and race by categorizing people racially, primarily by skin color-- people identify themselves in the categories: black, brown, white, or yellow. This is a controversial process within Brazil. This process challenges our ideas of Blackness in-context and contributes to the project of global anti-Blackness. Because of this way of identifying, just 7% of the population identified as ‘Black’ with more than 47% identifying as ‘Brown’. 

                                        …………

I got my organizing start as a teenager in San Francisco doing outreach work. At the time, I wanted independence (read: to make my own money). But as I began to gain vocabulary for my lived experience as a kid in a highly policed community, as the kid of an incarcerated parent, as someone living in a neighborhood without the resources we needed, someone who was accustomed to navigating systems for survival, someone with a trauma gut—I knew I was getting more than a paycheck, I was being put on with a form of knowledge that has shaped my life. I began seeing the signs of injustices everywhere and I couldn’t stop talking about it. My tolerance to feel powerless was lower and lower. Over time, I went from attending community meetings and reporting back the impacts to youth in my community to doing youth outreach, to leading trainings, to testifying at the capitol, to learning direct action strategies, to writing policy, and I’m still at the intersection of all of those places, with a more open heart (read: regularly heartbroken) and resilient determination for a future where Black folks are free here in the United States and around the world. 

I heard about the trip exactly a month before I got on the plane to go. When I read about the purpose of the trip I was so excited about the idea of international building and solidarity with Black folks that I had a hard time keeping my feet on the ground. The trip had a particular focus leading up to Brazil’s National Day of Black Consciousness, a day when Afro-Brazilians celebrate identity and raise awareness about the struggles of Black folks in Brazil. On our delegation’s preparation calls we spoke about our dreams to merge strategies toward Black liberation organizing and were hopeful about the opportunity to coordinate efforts/actions/campaigns that might amplify our voices, eventually, on a global scale.

                                            …….

On the day of the Black Consciousness parade, tens of thousands of people showed up.

There was a police line (made up of officers who were not visibly Black) that marched on either side of the massive group. There were several types of drums and shakers and bell sounds everywhere as chants turned into songs that became call and response. When we paused at an intersection, I heard some commotion and felt space being made by the bodies around me. There were two Black men dressed up as bruised and bloody boxers, fighting each other. They pantomimed sparring violently before pausing at a point in their bout to raise their fists in unison. After the brief moment, they were suddenly jolted by the imaginary striking of a bullet before falling to the ground. I watched this mini-performance happen at least five times as we marched. I was moved to tears each time they started back up, picking themselves up from the ground to fight again.

                                          ………

When he revved the engine, he was invoking the violent reality of what happens to black people in this place (in Brazil), and whether he meant to or not--what happens to Black people all over the world. Last year, across Brazil, 76 percent of the victims of police killings were Black, and 80 percent were between the ages of 12 and 29.

On another ride back to the hotel later in the week in Salvador, we were coming from a late night of dancing when we passed a funeral parlor that had a storefront on a main street. It was lit up with bright lights like a booth at a carnival. Caskets of all sizes were leaning up against every wall. There were people in line talking to the owner in the doorway. There was a child on someone’s hip. It was after 2am.

Like the United States, in Brazil, slavery exists as an ancestor to incarceration. Like the United States, the vast majority of incarcerated people in Brazil are Black. Like the United States, to be Black and breathing in Brazil, is to hold fear and celebration and grief in one hand, juggling. Like the United States, to be Black and breathing in Brazil is to live precariously at the mercurial whims of state sanctioned violence at all times--to know the metal taste of terror too well, to know the lingering scent of loss clinging to all of the clothes in your closet as a house scent.

                                         ……….

It is clear to me that the work that Black folks in Brazil do to get free, is inextricably tied to my own freedom.

In Brazil, there are Black people that look like me. There are Black people that look like you. Black people make the rhythm of Brazil and I didn’t have to speak the language to know that. We know us when we feel us.

me and my friends

me and my friends learn intimacy in each other’s hands                                                                  me and my friends channel knowledge for each other                                                                         and change spare tires                                                                                                                       ask about ex-boyfriends                                                                                                                      and comfort with mouths like our grandmothers                                                                          summon our most beloved elders  

me and my friends make mistakes                                                                                                      and love anyway                                  

me and my friends watch each other have children                                                                            and have fun at the club  

me and my friends know                                                                                                                    the tonal pitches of each quiet  

me and my friends know the fear of—

me and my friends know when it’s all too much.                                                                           know the look of one fading,                                                                                                              how the eyes look,                                                                                                                      pretending

me and my friends know                                                                                                                     I’m sorry,                                                                                                                                                 I fucked up                                                                                                                                              and                                                                                                                                                      How can I do right by you?

me and my friends know                                                                                                                   when one leaves,                                                                                                                                       we all leave

me and my friends know                                                                                                                                     hard love                                                                                                                                                     sometimes                                                                                                                                                      feels good

me and my friends want to see each other win                                                                                     we put in all of our chips to see to it                                                                                                     make our shoulders strong to stand on                                                                                                 pick out our afros for the occasion                                                                                                           put on our flyest suits                                                                                                                             bring our new girlfriends                                                                                                                          bring seeds in our pockets                                                                                                                     show up with                                                                                                                                           our wigs even                                                                                                                                             snug on the napes of our necks

when I forget who I am                                                                                                                                  I call her                                                                                                                                                   she never forgets 

I will hold fire for you when it's your turn:                                                                                             to cross the stage                                                                                                                                   to raise up the baby                                                                                                                                  to nail the headstand                                                                                                                              to get the medal                                                                                                                                      to close the conversation                                                                                                                         to empty the lot                                                                                                                                       to finalize the divorce                                                                                                                              to christen the baby                                                                                                                              to consecrate the offering                                                                                                                   to lay it/her/them to rest                                                                                                                        to read the thing aloud, finally                                                                                                                to weep uncontrollably at nothing for hours                                                                                          to shout the brave thing                                                                                                                               to be the designated driver                                                                                                                      to pull her elbow away from the creepy dude                                                                                       to hold the purse while you handle that business                                                                                 to bring the water

me and my friends lose contact                                                                                                           and come up for air                                                                                                                             years later                                                                                                                                           when we see each other on the street

smell each other’s hair                                                                                                                           and know                                                                                                                                                 the other has survived,                                                                                                               something, everything.                                                                                                                       start from the place we left off.

eat off the same plate                                                                                                                         head on the same pillow                                                                                                                        save from drowning, often

me and my friends feel everything                                                                                                          one of us goes to make the offering                                                                                                       and all our toes feel the tide                                                                                                              licking at our heels                                                                                                                                  feel the relief                                                                                                                                    balming over us                                                                                                                               already

*this poem is dedicated to my friend, Rheema. She stands at the intersection of fierceness and softness with me. She is currently fundraising to cover costs of her family's business closing in the Bay Area. You can donate and access her fundraising campaign here: https://www.youcaring.com/rheemacalloway-1106111

Grief, a series (pt. 2): a letter to my babydog, mink

She was more than my dog. She was my baby.

I saved her life at least twice—three times, actually. She was an omen. She was a friend. She was a pillow and a comforter. She was a burst of life and light on a leash. Expert pigeon chaser. Mercurial instruction listener. Face licker. Underwear chewer. High jumper. Shoe chewer. Book chewer (avid reader). Mattress chewer. Pen chewer. Table leg chewer. Rug/carpet chewer. Couch chewer. Plant chewer. Limit tester. Full-time unconditional lover. Therapist. Love sigher. Cuddler (laps, legs, same pillow too close to my face), burrowing under covers. Made me late to work because I couldn’t stand to leave her by herself being this dang cute. Witching hour hallway runner hunter. Nosey neighbor. Bossypants. Always returns home. Answers to her name and ‘treat’ and ‘walk’ and ‘outside’. Always returns bounding with a smile and tongue hanging out the side of her face.

Mink,

You taught me to trust you each time I let you off the leash and you came running back when you heard panic in my voice. You taught me patience with each carpet stain and each ruined thing I didn’t need in the first place. You taught me in-my-face-joy. Over and over and over again. I knew the lurch of fear and anxiety absorbing your pain anytime you were sick. I knew the guilt, the winding cycle of self-deprecation each time I couldn’t walk you because I was too tired or too depressed. The guilt of staying out late knowing you were waiting on me at home, alone. The relief of you loving me anyway. Of you being excited to see me anyway. The mutual joy of having a companion who never gives up on me. Never.

I am relieved and grateful revisiting the photos and videos of us. I loved you and you felt it. I loved you enough to see you in all of the small, tiny, precious things. The ants, the bees, the mice, the pigeons, every small thing took on your spirit (and continues to) because of my love for you. You have transformed my relationship to the world.

When I went in to the SPCA I was going to visit with dogs because I was more stuck and depressed and isolated than I had ever been. I had been trying everything to get out of it. When you came into the room and began munching on my hair, I couldn’t help but laugh. I knew you were mine. Despite the fact that five other people had come to adopt you while we played. Your love brought me back to life. Your energy reminded me of the joy and urgency of living. Of seeing things for the first time and accepting, even loving them, immediately. Your too-muchness made me build a relationship to my own too-muchness (that I’d kept pulled away and reserved only for solo sessions of target practice). I thought you were a burden because I was more concerned with how people would receive you. I also feared for you, a reckless puppy. At every turn you could have got off leash and into traffic or trapped under a fence or eat something you weren’t supposed to (like you had many times before). Like you did this time when you didn’t survive.

The first thing I felt when I got the call before 5am was—this is my fault. There’s nothing like getting a call at that hour—it makes me want to throw my phone into a fire just thinking about it. My belly turns just at the thought of a call before 5am. I was still optimistic, though. I asked my ancestors to keep you out of pain and to do what was best. I surrendered early on—praying for your health and recovery, admitting that I was so far away in New York and had so little control and wanted nothing more than to run from this situation—back in time, to our little home, to you prepping yourself for a comfortable spot for sleeping under me under the covers. Readjusting and warm.

When I got the call from the doctor they said you had staples or some kind of metal in your stomach. They said you’d gone into septic shock. ‘The prognosis was bad’. You most likely wouldn’t live. They recommended humane euthanasia.

I had been moving about the day shaking. But, I am an actress. I had my first-ever meeting with a literary agent and laughed on cue and made eye contact while my muscles made knots around themselves. While my stomach became a muscle that tied a knot around itself. I don’t even remember how the meeting went besides looking back and forth between the top rows of her shelves on either side of the room where she had standing copies of newly released books for authors she agented. She was a small woman and I remember only wondering if she’d stood in the chair I sat in to put the books up there. I came downstairs to receive the news.

You were alone there. I said I needed to see you before they euthanized you. A nurse said she could facetime me in. I was so afraid and so grateful. There was a wave made of white foam and a riptide. I saw your little batface—one eye blinking slower than the other. You didn’t seem to be in pain. They’d put you on pain meds by then. You were laying on your side, your head up and nodding. I said hi to you. Hi Mommy’s babygirl. And you weren’t responsive to my voice. What happened?  I was outside in midtown. Sitting on the wooden ledge of a café, making a seat out of nothing because I couldn’t do anything standing. People walked by as I crooned into the front camera on my phone. Hi baby and hi baby and hi my little baby dog until I said my last words to you.

I thanked you for loving me and for letting me love you. I thanked you for saving my life and being the bright light that I didn’t know I needed until I knew. I tried to forget that there was at least one stranger I didn’t know, listening to me say my last words to you, holding a phone so I could see you before injecting you with a liquid that would extinguish you, immediately. I said that I looked forward to seeing and knowing you and loving you in another lifetime. That I was grateful that I got to know and love you this lifetime. That I was so sorry for what happened, it was a horrible accident, a horrible accident, a horrible accident.

The vet let me know that he was injecting the liquid. Your head dropped immediately. Neck went limp and you were gone. I saw the vet for the first time from a weird angle, he repeated that he was so so sorry before hanging up the facetime call.

I bawled on the side of the street. I cried with a knot in my throat all through the street. I called my grandma and she cried with me (you were the only dog I’ve ever seen my grandma hold and pet and love and buy Christmas presents for!). I told all my friends that I was planning to spend time with during my brief visit about you immediately—they prepared to hold me in my grief. They made me tea and rubbed my back and hugged me and sat with me and held my hands as I made calls and made arrangements—to retrieve your collar or put words on a commemorative urn. They went to dance classes with me and checked in while they were at work on breaks and ate food with me and took me to the beach with a bouquet of flowers to make my offering. They lead me in ceremony. They lead me to the rivers they knew so that I could talk to you from thousands of miles away and at least one dimensional plane apart. They gave me stuffed animals to keep with me to talk to in your absence and reminded me of grief as a cycle and love as a part of the same cycle, and the act of honoring love by grieving. They texted me to remind me to eat food and drink water. They gave me sunglasses to wear on the train because I couldn’t ride a stop without hiccupping into a good cry remembering that you wouldn’t be home when I got back. They sent their love because they knew how big of a loss this was for me—because they loved you too.

You gave me the confidence to build strong community (you were the social one!). Because of it, I am held fully in my loss of you. Thank you for being my babydog. And for being so much more than my babydog. I hope you are enjoying life as a brilliant idea reincarnated over and over again and shared between loving people. I hope you are enjoying life as a lightening bolt or an electric current flying through as much space as you dare to inhabit. I know you’re wild and offleash like you should be. I’ll make sure to leave a few treats on my altar for you in case you ever have enough time to stop by for a moment to visit.

Love always,

mom

Grief, a series (pt.1)

I’ve decided that I will not be ruined this summer.

I’ve decided that I will not be jekyllhyded by grief

That I will not hide hurt from myself

out of fear

I look forward to going there.

I look forward.

I’ve decided,

I look forward to the time

letting sadness and longing

reel out of me

through my back

and into the floor.

I’ve decided to choreograph my own grief dance

I’ve decided to spend my time

(this time)

believing that healing is possible without being swallowed.

Without emerging,

by cutting myself triumphantly out of the belly of a great whale

after lingering in the darkness there.

I have decided.

That it does not have to be wholeconsuming

 to be real.

I have decided.

I can stop when it hurts too much.

Fold the corner of the page,

and return to it when I’m ready.

I have already decided.

I will not be broken in half this summer.

It’s too late to grieve the old way,

by way of being eatenalive.

Of ignoring the bleeding out.

Of becoming nothing

until I can’t taste my food.

I have decided.

to laugh at the audacity of humidity.

To let my anxious stomach

fall out of my butt

when it drops,

If it dares.

To love.

I have decided to love.

(in the present).

I have decided.

I can be healed by the medicine

spun by my own fingers

for the top of my own head.

I have decided.

that I am still curious

about joy

in the deep mist of griefjunglefloor.

I have decided.

In my own image.

I can dance with two lovers.

Laughing and crying.

With both feet

taking turns

then together

off of the ground.

what it looks like from here

I.

Life is lonely as a conduit.

Everybody thinking they love you because you got answers flowing through you.

Because you see them in a world where nobody ain’t too fond of looking anybody in the eye,

Really.

It’s lonely being a river that flows in two directions.

Everybody love your water ‘til they’re whisked away

And it’s your fault

for being a river in the first place

Even when you posted signs.

And told them,

When they got too close

To touching ground in the deep, rushing end

And you had to look at them sternly

And say,

“Be careful. I don’t play.”

Everybody got shit they want you to pull out of your chest for them:

“Won’t you go deep in that raspy spot behind that lung and let me know who’s gon’ win the game tonight?”

Everybody see your light and only want to play it.

Only want to use it ‘til it’s darkness.

Only want to take it.

Take it as an invitation.

Then complain about the fire going out

When they didn’t put no wood in the pile.

II.

Life as a myth is tired.

I spend my days too big to fit indoors.

Up on a high hill,

Listening

To the tired and tried prayers of men

With imprints in their knees.

I’m not supposed to tell them,

“That they wouldn’t have to be kneeling all the damn time if they dared do right by anybody but themselves”

But I be thinking it.

So what,

I spend my nights with my feet up.

Burping and picking my teeth

With their sorry offerings.

I bet if you weren’t supposed to live,

You’d be hungry enough to gnaw at the

Praying hands

Of sorry men,

Too.

III.

Living under the ground as several severed parts can be exhausting.

Some days my head

can’t even open my eyes.

Some days my fingers twittle

And I feel something

Maybe my other hand,

turning over soil in my palm.

And my ears can almost hear

the kiki-ing of my toes

finding each other

saying softly,

“I think I can feel it,

Can you?

Can you feel it?

I think I’m feeling it.

Can you?”

I used to walk

on top of the street,

before I was a cautionary tale.

I used to wear what I wanted

And hitchhike

And not answer to,

“AYE, AYE MAMI—YOU WITH THE LEGS”

from across the street.

I was baaaaaaaaaad.

Bad meaning good.

There was many a story

Told about me.

Ones where I ate men whole,

without regard.

Where I smoked

and drank

and cussed

and peed standing up

and sang at the table

and whistled

and burped

and ain’t cover my mouth when I smiled

and led us all to freedom.

And raised hell with two

Too-small hands.

And didn’t have the baby.

And couldn’t have the baby.

And let my hair grow,

until my locs turned to snakes.

And fed a million children

by way of miracle making,

(with no thanks).

And cured five million people of polio

And was still buried

in a shallow grave.

They got plenty of stories about me.

But they never get my laugh right.

And every few decades,

when they dig up a piece of me,

they never bother to be curious enough

to match one side of me with

the other.

Yeah.

They got plenty stories about me.

But ain’t nobody ever asked me which one was my favorite.

They never let me choose.

Even though I end up dead in all of them.

End Money Bail

Last week San Francisco's Board of Supervisors held a hearing on money bail. I was asked to testify about the harm of money bail. I recommend a swift and complete end to money bail. In it's place, I recommend community release based on a needs assessment that provides folks with the resources (preferably wraparound services) they need to thrive. Additionally, I recommend courts be replaced entirely by Restorative Justice processes and jails and prisons be closed altogether. Jails and prisons only address the symptoms of systemic harms and marginalization with violence. This vision is another essay entirely, so I'll just leave you with my testimony before I get carried away:

When my father was arrested, the bail was set at $500,000. My family was in a state of deep shock and distress. We didn’t have half a million dollars. We didn’t even have the 10% needed to pay to a bail bondsman. We barely had 1% of the bail amount. We had no assets, owned no property, were disenfranchised to the bone. Without having the 10% to pay to the bail bonds company, my father stayed in jail. In jail, my father missed out on so much—including my college graduation and his father's funeral.

Money bail is harmful no matter what—you hurt when you pay, and everyone hurts when you can’t.

It’s not just our family who has been hurt by this unjust practice. At least 46,000 Californians are affected by the harmful practice of money bail. According to 2015 Board of State and Community Corrections data, 46,000 people were kept in California jails, not because they had been convicted of a crime, but simply because they could not afford the bail for their release.

That’s 46,000 empty seats at graduations, at the sides of hospital beds of elderly loved ones, and at the dinner tables at every holiday family gathering. This past December, there was one empty seat at my sister’s baby shower. It was my father’s.

At the baby shower we passed a phone around the celebration gathering—to my mother, my grandmother, my sister, to each of my little cousins—to hear my father speak to us with a knot in his throat because he was missing out on becoming a grandfather for the first time.

Money bail is like a ransom note to women and families. When we can’t pay it, we are all punished. Freedom should not come with a price tag.

In California, the median California bail is $50,000. That’s five times higher than the national average. San Francisco’s bail average is one of the highest in the state.

Women bear the greatest burden of this failed system. Today, 1 in 4 women, and 1 in 2 Black women, has an incarcerated loved one in prison. Women make up more than 80% of family members primarily responsible for covering court-related costs. As Black women we already make pennies on the dollar for grueling work because of pervasive wage inequality. This is much of the reason as to why I am not joined by thousands of women in this room this morning. Know that I stand here today representing at least eighty women (nieces to great grandmothers) in my family who have had to navigate the money bail system through bail bondsmen, giving hundreds of thousands of dollars over time. This is money that we will never see again. We paid this money in order to have our loved ones get a fighting chance to show up to their trial in a suit and not an orange jumper and shackles. To meet with an attorney and not have to guess when the next time they see their public defender will be (if at all, before court).

I urge you to do everything in your power to end money bail. We have a long legacy of conflating data visibility and transparency with accountability in this city, which makes no difference in the day to day lives of people suffering from issues like the harms of money bail.

I urge you to also start upstream, tying police accountability for their proven bias (via the DOJ Report) with the representation of Black residents (as 3-5% of this cities population) as over half of the entire jail population. I urge you to tie the prevalence of desperate plea deals in San Francisco to the inhumane conditions (proven via numerous official city reports) of people living in 850 Bryant for over a year waiting to see trial (like my father did) just because their families can't afford bail.

Once and for all, it’s time to end the money bail system. People like me who have been impacted by the bail system are locking arms with advocates and leaders across the country to pressure states to dismantle the brutal money bail system that forces people to buy their freedom. I urge you to link arms with us too.

Money bail actually began in San Francisco. This is the perfect place and the perfect time to end it.

so far away

It’s been weeks since I felt clear.

I am trying to make sense of it but it’s a pretty nonsensical time.

I’ve had a pressure headache nearly everyday for the past few weeks. Sometimes I can sense other muscles (like my belly or my neck or shoulders or even my butt) causing the tension in my head and I have to go completely limp throughout my body in order to ease the headache.

I can’t remember what/if I pressed something (an emotion, a trauma) down in order to get to this depressed place. It’s usually brought on by something like that.

I spend the moments when I’m not feeling depressed half enjoying being able to breathe through my nose and see things clearly and half stifling air through my throat and tensing my belly afraid that I will be sucked back into depression.

How the fuck did I get here?

I didn’t realize that I’d worked more than 40 hours a week for three consecutive weeks until I book two flights for the same time on the same day. And didn’t realize this mistake until nearly a full week after it happened. Then spent hours on the phone trying to explain to someone how such a thing could be an honest mistake. An honest mistake.

Psychic stress had it so that I left my keys in a car on my way to the airport and didn’t realize it until I landed in New Orleans and was so overwhelmed by things I couldn’t see that I unpacked and repacked my bag for no reason and noticed my keys missing. A net of community would have it so that I could call the driver and arrange with many thankyouthankyouthankyous for him to return my keys to my neighbor for her to hold for me until I got back from my trip a week later.

I hope this doesn’t sound like shaming. I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m apologizing. I am moving toward a place when I don’t feel ashamed to be depressed. I am moving toward a place where I don’t apologize for not being present during a spell of dissociation. ‘Cause I don’t feel sorry. ‘Cause I don’t feel much of anything.

Psychic stress would have it so that I locked my keys in my car on the day of my birthday celebration. A net of community would have it so that my best friend could go to her house and get my spare key to go to my house to get my spare car key (which I’d made for the first time in ten years of having this car) to unlock my door and get us to my birthday celebration (where I was surrounded by music and good food and my family and friends in one place for the first time since my sixteenth birthday).

Psychic stress would have it so that when I slept I only dreamt of stress and woke up with a body wound up too tight and a jaw clenched with teeth bracing on top of each other.

I felt a blur over everything. A film over my eyes. My fingers and hands touched things and I felt nothing.

My dishes piled up and there was still powder to vacuum on my carpet and solution to scrub sitting in my tub.

I confused my days.

I had no desire to do anything, especially not move my body, which is what I needed to do most.

Deadline after deadline held the front of my head. I met them all. #highfunctioning #deadlinesbedamned

In the midst of being overwhelmed I had made the decision (over and over) somewhere in my mind that deadlines were more important than taking care of myself. Everything followed suit.

In this particular bout with depression and dissociation I recognized how good I’ve gotten at high functioning and keeping it moving.

In this particular bout with depression, I pretend less. When people asked how I was, I didn’t lie as much.

When people asked, I told them I was moving through it.

I moved quickly through hyper-sensitivity and dissociation with high spirits on my birthday.

Why does it take so long to come back?

I know my tools and I hate them when I’m depressed.

I trust me with myself (even in the middle of this quiet shitstorm) and that feels good.

I tried. Lighting my candles. Looking people in the eye. Using a massage ball on my sore muscles.

I didn’t want to answer my phone, was overwhelmed and over stimulated by everything, flakey, anxious, apprehensive.

My gift of sensitivity was off.

My mind was foggy, which felt like a deliberate curse.

Most of my good habits were off/forgotten.

Last Wednesday, I felt that I had calves and shins and didn’t remember the last time I remembered that I had calves and shins because I felt them.

It deeply irritated me when people said things like, “the stress isn’t worth it/positive thinking will change things/you have to meditate and get outside.” I KNOW (in my quietest voice, ‘thank you’). When I’m depressed these things sound impossible, improbable and work to push me away from people I love. It doesn’t feel useful unless someone is making a plan with me to go on a walk or somehow making it easy to do self-care and be accompanied in it.

I had a talk with myself. I said I’m ready to start feeling stuff again.

I have enough energy to make (what feels like big), difficult decisions for myself that just wants to stay inside in bed all day.

Yesterday, after turning my car around three times I made it to Congolese dance class, alone. I’d been avoiding it because I had in the very forefront of my mind that I did not want to be watched or criticized. I was grateful warming up when I told myself over and over under my breath that I came to class for myself. When I told myself that I didn’t possibly have the energy to grade my performance and be concerned with what anyone/everyone thought about my dancing and dance at the same time. That I should just dance. That I should just break a sweat and let that be enough.

ancestors watching

Last month I stayed on an old plantation in North Carolina.

Before it was a retreat center, it was a school campus. Before it was a school, it was sharecropper land. Before it was sharecropper land, it was a plantation. A site of terror for the breaking of unruly slaves.

I traveled to this place with other healers and organizers from all over the nation for a Healing & Safety Council Retreat for Black organizers with BYP100. An email had been sent out to the group prior to our arrival giving key information about the space. Honestly, I’d just left my job the week before and when I opened the email and it said ‘The water smells strongly of metal here,’ I stopped reading. I didn’t get to the part where it explained that the site of the retreat would be an old plantation. So, when we pulled into the grounds and I saw an old house that was that old, I knew where I was immediately and regretted not reading the email in full.

In addition to the water smelling strongly of sulfur, the land itself carried a very high vibration (and I’m not just saying that with good old Bay Area ‘woo’). For a solid portion of my time there, I walked around very quietly as if trying not to upset a baby. I felt like someone was trying to talk to me.

The healing work we came together to learn was about transformational justice. About working inward to make calling the police an obsolete option. We know that the harm that police cause in our communities, to our children and families is an act of terror and rarely (if ever) ends well for Black people (and that’s putting it lightly). We planted seeds together to build the technical strategies, the harm reduction approaches, the first-responder responses, and the flexibility to address instances of harm within our communities without ever calling the police.

Prior to doing this work we were grounded as a group in the knowing that we are all the answer to an ancestor’s prayer. There were several times throughout the material and our group grounding activities where I could’ve fell out and cried and caught the spirit—this was one of them. I thought about all of the times I walked around with my head down or full of doubt. I thought about my harming others instead of asking for help or grace. I thought about Black people, my people, every single one of us being an answer. I don’t have the words for what shifted in my being but I changed my mind. I think I had decided not to stifle the love that flows through me abundantly. Instead, to let it all wash over my people, each one an answer to a prayer. Each of us bearing the weight. Each of us, myself included, needing this outpouring of love that I was given and had been damming up for fear of fear (this is another essay in itself). 

When everyone else felt the haze too, the heaviness that is ancestor spirit being in the room, we loved each other almost immediately. I’ve never seen so many loves of my life in one place.

I wanted to be as free as I could on this land. Feeling the spirit of these ancestors who toiled and bled and died and were separated from their families and their children on this land. I felt them inviting me to put my toes in the dirt. To be mad for them, spit and pull up things out of the ground in spite. But mostly to be free.

…….

Every time I come together with my BYP100 family, I remember the importance of having spaces that are all-Black. Without my conscious inviting of a de-cloaking of all parts of myself weathered by the beating and harsh winds of the outside world, I began talking to people I’d never met the way I talk to my family. I began laughing and smiling without consciously covering the side of my mouth where a tooth is missing. If I was curious or upset or feeling strongly about something, it came out readily. For the duration of the retreat, I did not compete for anything and I felt whole and loved. This is also freedom.

I’ve been really shy and self-conscious/insecure about singing since I stopped being guided by my bursting heart (8 or 9 years old?) but in this space, on this land, I let it out, I let me out. I sang loudly and made music until early in the morning with other healers and organizers. Went inside of an old old schoolhouse on the grounds that had been half eaten by time and termites. Learned about the mightiness of tiny chiggers (not too personally, thankfully).

Throughout the retreat, healers of all talents talked about sensing things and even seeing things on the land we were on. I felt a little bit of jealousness beginning to creep up under my feet. I shook it out. I wanted to see stuff and hear stuff from the ancestors, too.

At the end of day two, I was overwhelmed by jetlag. I drank coffee, then water, then hot water. And when I couldn’t stay up any longer unless I was to become short and unkind to others, I excused myself for a nap. This nap would be the beginning of the floodgate of clear message dreams sent to me while I was on this land. I’d forgotten for a moment too long that this was the way I received my messages.

I dreamt that there was a fire. I only knew that there was a fire because I saw smoke. I walked out of my room (inside of a house where I lived but didn’t recognize as my own in my waking life) and saw smoke and the back of a small child as she was running and busting out of the swinging kitchen door, presumably to safety.

In the dream, I had things in my hand and turned back toward my room to grab things before getting out (I had my laptop and my backpack in mind to grab). I stopped almost as soon as I’d turned around toward my room telling myself calmly and clearly, ‘No. There’s a fire. This is a fire.’ And I left everything behind. According to my dream journal, I did grab a small precious thing (I don’t remember this part of the dream now).

I moved calmly and deliberately through the house as whitegrey smoke came into the kitchen, crawling up the ceiling. When I made the decision to leave things behind in order to get out, I woke up before exiting the house.

I woke up from the dream in a panic because I’ve had several foreshadowing dreams that have come true within a matter of weeks. I was afraid that literally this might be a warning about a fire in my home. I made a reminder for myself to check my fire alarms when I got home, to remind my loved ones to do the same, to be careful burning candles, to check my insurance policy, etc.

Returning to the group after the dream, my belly was still anxious. Even after making the list of things to check on to best protect myself. I talked with the healers in the group about it. Someone said that the child was my intuition. Someone said that smoke without fire means that I am afraid—could be with the new life changes I’ve made for myself (leaving my job without securing another one first). Someone said I’m having a hard time making a decision. I tried each one on to see which one might make my belly less queasy.

Reading my waking journal after the dream, I see the half asleep handwriting of a scrawled question, “Am I the fire?”

By the time we packed up to leave, I had made several offerings to ancestor spirits on the land. While waiting on my ride to the airport, I took a long walk out to the fields as far as the land extended in one direction. The old houses, the main campus, where the big house would be, were small from there. I thought about the distances that kept my ancestors (who I don’t know, but who feel like loved ones) apart. Even in a distance that took just fifteen minutes to walk. I thought about the invisible control that kept and keeps us from loving each other. I thought about what clever ways and subtle movements of eyes and hands had to say ‘I see you, I love you’ when communication was forbidden. When love was forbidden. When freedom was forbidden.

In this site of disaster and devastation, I felt the resilience of ancestors who would not ever break. Who gave and continue to give the spirit of indestructibility and possibility to us. I am eternally curious and grateful for their guidance.