 Here is a picture of the flowers I threw into the water at Alameda Beach. Here is a picture of them spread out onto the shore. Here's a picture of giving, something old away. Visual moments that fail to describe or answer or articulate. Something about mourning and grief, something about ritual, something about rage, something about tiny gestures that make a big big space. Something about release. When I break, something big always happens. When I break, something big always comes through. Listen to the dead. Say what your mother won't. A few weeks ago, I used these flowers in a performance about intergenerational trauma and creating a portal for the past, present, and future to rage together against the individual and collective impacts of silence, patriarchy, and colonialism. In a glass of water, they sat with me on stage, with the heaviness and the catharsis and the conjuring of the past, holding, absorbing. Flower bodies carry a grief, too. Lately, I've been attuning to something more watery than writing. My poetry is refusing in new forms. Tears, touch, flowers, flame, a soft dream, a glass of water, a shimmer, a wet dance, mint, mugwort, compulsive sweeping, ritual, repetition, repeat. Here, a photo of the flowers I threw into the ocean. They were drenched and they were dripping. They were waiting to be let out. What does it mean to heal? What does it mean to heal versus cope? What is the difference between healing and feeling soothed? In 2013, Craig Santos Perez wrote, poetry is our defense against tyranny. It should not be the poet's role to lip-sync the rhetoric of empire. The poet's role is to challenge and question. The poet's role is to inspire others towards dismantling empire so that a truly humane form of life can emerge. Healing as reform, healing as individual, healing as something conducive to capitalist productivity, healing as a market, healing as emotional and reproductive labor, healing as a narrative, sponsored by the state. Somehow backwards in the ritual, somehow back in the ritual, somehow backwards in time, somehow behind. Yesterday I read, reconciling yourself to the world as it is isn't healing. I want new language to describe a process deeper and more dangerous than reconciliation to the world as it is. I want to do more than feel. I want to do something different than explain. I want the fire for the way it burns. I want the fire for the way it makes light. This is called how we make and learning to stay. One. Bent over their rib cage, I inked an outline of the Mississippi passing through Minnesota. I liked it better as a fuzzy constellation before I came and turned it into something thicker. Something scary happens inside of me when someone I love gives me permission to press into them so deeply. I leave a river of Speedball India ink in my wake. Two. She asked us to write a list of things we need next to a list of things we want. I skipped food, water, wrote down, space to talk about hard shit openly, space to talk about suicide and self-harm. My dad brought me a blue scarf back from Vietnam. I have grown to appreciate the pattern, but he always gives me the wrong things, except when he drove 400 miles to bring me my mother still alive. Four. Three. In the distance, we might believe we all stay small and distant reflections of light that has left us dimming in the distance. Four. How not to disappear in space where the stars stay tiny and I stay tiny too. Five. My outline becomes a radius of light touching new light. They say, this is forever. I say, I have never seen anything so bright. We heal from separation. We break what we spill over. We are never too much or not enough. We starve the state. We detoxify. We hold sacred our flesh. A live poem. We call ourselves to dream. Higher than body, we are light. Deeper than light, we are sound. Fuller than sound, we are song. Dancing out of the grave. Dancing each other alive again. And I will just wrap up reading a few sections of a chat book that I wrote in 2012. So older work but that is feeling resonant with me lately. Our desires are not simply wants. Our desires are needs deemed unnecessary by a system that benefits off of the denial of our existence. And we are denied the experience of our existence. We become accustomed to denying ourselves the experience of our own necessary desires. Transgression. A violation of an imposed limit or boundary. My queer desire is abundant and unlimited. November. I knew right then that this would change me. Would make me tender again. My rib cage, a mountainside opening. Wind pushing through earth. Would make me tender again. You arrived. A burning morning sky. Wind pushing through earth. Opened my heart with your fist. You arrived. A burning morning sky. We met on the first night of late October summer. Opened my heart with your fist. The season coveting us in her heat. We met on the first night of late October summer. My rib cage, a mountainside opening. The season coveting us in her heat. I knew right then that this would change me. Transgression. Up to the forearms in each other. Opened we fall sticky asleep. Our own salts and acids. Awakened by our own push and pull. I could tongue your palm for hours and find myself there. Powerful. Thrust forth a raging bull. Provoked by a passion for her own endangered survival. Never again will I purge this. Fear this gift. This non-destructive desire. This taste of an uprising. Hilled forth from my insides with your fist. And last a short one. My gender is a red dress in the middle of the desert. Heat soaked on a cactus. Aking to bloom to be just needles and sun. Or maybe that's what my femininity feels like. Not woman, but a body burning in love and riot. Thank you.