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Queer as in my attraction to you is an attraction to concepts for which you are a practical substitute.
iawîyak kanihtâ mihtâtahk = a body made of regret.
What might it look like for NDNs to refuse life in the wake of all that’s happened to us in a country in which we’re social experiments before all else?
Everywhere, Canadians are forgiven for a history they continue to stage in the theatres of everyday life.
When two bodies embrace they become a window. Gender is what’s heard when wind touches glass. Remember: by the time sound reaches the flesh, innumerable bursts of light have already shot through us.
“I’m an emotional person, so I read theory day in and day out.”
i can tell
“aleatory
You can affix a price tag to anything—including a poem—to strip it of its treacherous affectivity.
None of your crying will unsick or unkill anyone.
I’m ravenous for the future, but my longings are incompatible with the available versions of it. Bummer.
The thing that makes men manly is that they force everyone to be witness to their vengeance. I want no part in this.
STATISTICAL SUBJECTS Enumeration is an exercise that banks on a cruel form of nostalgia.
ur-feeling.
??? google has failed ne
I don’t want my voice to be churned through a biopolitics of data collection that is the process of racialization. I won’t take part in a performance of self that entraps me in a vicious circle of proof-making.
My thesis statement: Joy is an at once minimalist and momentous facet of NDN life that widens the spaces of living thinned by structures of unfreedom. I will spend the rest of my life enfleshing this argument. This catalog, then, doesn’t and can’t end.
(Scrolling through tweets while my bladder emptied, it occurred to me that straight men my age likely don’t partake in this form of multi-tasking. Standing to pee seems like a relic of a bygone era; nowadays we maximize excretory time. Yet another unanticipated confluence of the gay agenda and late capitalism.)
wtf???
love, “one of the few places,” according to Lauren Berlant, “where people actually admit they want to become different.”2 To me, this means that in order to architect a livable world with someone, a loved one, with you, I have to undergo a process of self-abolition, to be in a position of existential risk.
Were you to press your ear to my chest, you would hear not a heartbeat, but a persistent growl, or what you might mistake for one.
I believe care is disruptive and world-bearing;
Late August 2017. After just two weeks apart we meet up at, of all places, a mall, where we both have Saturday night plans. You apologize profusely to me, tears welling in your eyes. I look into them as though they’ll save us from what our hands are capable of. I accept your apology, believing that you are less wildfire than before. You tell me that you’ve ceased being able to determine what to do with yourself, which revealed to me that you hadn’t yet mustered the courage to call grief by its ugly name. Back at my apartment, we sway from side to side backlit by the moon. I tell you I want to
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sns...
if you hadn’t been my boyfriend, my family wouldn’t have been able to see me in love.
How frequently can one redraw the outline of a body and still call it art?
All my most volatile and consuming yearnings could be summarized as a desire for an unstructured life, one without an organizational system other than something like untidiness.
I have lived. (The most dishonest sentence I have written.)
Some days, the act of writing isn’t so much holding a mirror to oneself but to a future grave.
Desirous of a beautiful life I get out of bed, but it’s Monday and I’m in the throes of a genocide.
Value judgments that smother suicide in shame extend the violence that stunted the lives of queer and trans NDN youth in the first place.
Fred Moten: “Anybody who thinks that they can understand how terrible the terror has been, without understanding how beautiful the beauty has been against the grain of the terror, is wrong.”
Mouth the word “enemy,” but don’t enunciate it, for it isn’t a subject position worth keeping in the world.
How cruel to have our critiques of the ways in which unlivable lives are manufactured everywhere in Canada heard as evidence of our ability to speak and nothing else!
sit in my vehicle in the parking lot for thirty minutes, sobbing. The sobs come from a cavernous place inside me in which it is easy to get lost. There is a cavern of this sort inside all NDNs. Some of us reside there because we’ve stopped looking for an exit.
I wonder: How will we ever look white people in the eyes and not periodically see our mangled bodies?
We have Canadian citizenship, of course, and as citizens we will remember how to participate in the world, but we are still the hunted.
For Soto, those killed in Pulse had erected “cathedrals,” cathedrals others mistook for cemeteries.
