A Language of Limbs

by Dylin Hardcastle

I realise that hate and love sometimes come wrapped up and intertwined.

because something about this place feels like an embrace, like hot breath on skin, like the curve of a caring smile. Like catching your friend’s gaze in a crowd and thinking, oh…there you are.

but we’ve always been here, in the margins…if you know where to look.

because so often I have felt that futurity does not belong to me, that I am bound to the present, unable to imagine a beyond in which I want to live, but

It’s all of us, blissfully unaware that by the end of this decade, half our home will be dead.

People often talk about how what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And I think, sometimes, what doesn’t kill you makes you tired.

Silence, we are already learning, will be the overwhelming and recurrent quality of this decade and the next.

People don’t need to be righteous in order to be respected,