Audio Slut
My body is seen as poronrgraphic .
My body is censored.
My body is read as woman,
They will kill me for it.
My body is read as black,
They will kill me for it.
I am trans.
They will kill me for it.
I made of stories and hopes.
I am made of loving bones.
I am made of truth,
I am unknown to you.
I am unknown to myself.
I am prisms of light.
I wear no disguise.
I wear no shield.
My armour is love.
It is how I heal.
It is my home.
It is my truth.
In my body,
I am bloom.
I am fruit.
I am new.
The roommate
Day.
She sits waiting. Changing in disgusting of ways.
Shadows follow her in the day, not in reflection but in gloom. They hide in her room.
It is the movement of her feet that irritates me. The tip and tap and hushing of her toes against the floor, she mutes the delicious pattern of life, with a boring disguise.
I feel nothing in her eyes.
She feels rotten in the most insidious way- hidden from view- pleasant enough to pick-yet you see it is rotten through. She has a monster and its large screams of need, vibrate in silent ecstasy.
They want company.
I told them, they couldn’t feed from me.
I wonder what she needs from me now.
Night.
Silence.
She demands silence more than peace. It disgusts me.
I like silence.
The forced need to be silent is what frustrates me.
She begs you to consider what it means to be a moving form. She needs silence. She does not want me to talk, she meekly moves in space, chasing the forever of her ghastly ways. She is ghost. Even to herself, or perhaps she feels in perpetual ways. I can’t see her. I do not want to chase.
I feel disgust.
A beast that is nothing more than a foul musk. That is the sound of the person who needs to declare sleep, at 10pm. To a person like me- who cares for nothing other than dreams.
Photography by Klaudia Borowiec
They will shoot you down for your bravery,
Dead on the street.
Ripping you,
With rotten bleeding teeth.
Their words seep
You see no mercy.
The nothingness
of
life.
Summed up with,
Breaking news body found in lake.
Please don’t take him away.
They will shoot you for your bravery
Dead on the street.
They will shoot you for your bravery.
Without letting you speak.
Please,
I am a woman with child.
They shoot you down.
Smile.
We brought him home.
Laid him, at your feet.
Smile, for the crowd.
Cry, for the television screens.
They have laid him at your feet.
They do not speak.
They say nothing-
As they shoot you down.
With the awful sound-
” That is all we can do for now.”
R.I.P. Richard Okorogheye
Photography by Ivana Cajina
I like nothing-
Other than you.
Your tender skin-
Peeled into a crunch.
Savouring love.
Your flesh ingrained with delicious desire.
Wetting my lips
Bending my neck,
I bite.
Your flavour sinks into my life,
Seizing my mind,
With your fragrant ties
You take me over-
I beg for nothing-
Other than you-
Your rebirth.
Your fruit.
Photography by Jon Sailor
Desire
I feel cold without you,
I make tea.
I feel lost without you,
A makeshift map,
of arrows on the ground,
Hearing,
whispers of your sound.
I feel lonely without you,
The Bear,
in approach.
Gnawing my clothes,
Ripping my flesh
A tasty bed,
of disgrace.
Moisture builds on your lip,
You like me like this.
A longing,
To be kissed.
I feel scared.
Say it again.
I feel scared.
Say it again.
You take me to bed.
Lay me down
Gag my mouth.
Pleasurable screams,
Silenced within your white sheets.
Stand,
On your feet.
Erect.
Back straight.
Legs wide.
Mouth open.
Your shoulders behind me.
Feet beside me.
Your breasts pressing into my wings,
Slow.
You move down.
Your fingers,
Bend my sound.
I croak.
I moan.
I am your bow.
Tell me what you do when you are alone?
When I am cold, lost and lonely,
I wait for you.
When I am scared,
I become you.
Bend your knees and open wide.
The darkness of my spirit fills the night sky.
Photography by Darius Iromlou
Pride.
I am not a child of pride.
Nothing to see.
I am not a child of pride.
Nothing to bleed.
I am not a child of pride.
Nothing to know.
I am not a child of pride.
Nothing to grow.
I place a seed in my hand,
Cocooning my head in the sand.
The wind pushes me away.
I fall into the tides.
Chasing the seed in the chaos of its wake.
I am not a child of pride.
No motion to follow.
No mountain to climb.
No hill to conquer.
Time.
My mother laid me down-
Taking my hand and tucking me tight.
Uttering words that haunt me every night.
Do not worry child-
There are no monsters under your bed
No monsters that will chew your bones.
Only monsters that won’t accept no.
I am not a child of pride.
I am not a child,
You see.
I am a message, conceived.
I am a tradition, untold.
I am culture, with no home
Bloody hands,
sink into the ocean.
Shedding into hydrotropic weavings,
Sieving.
Dreaming.
For the seed.
That held the togetherness
Of the land,
I wish to breathe.
Photography by Darius Iromlou
You never liked me. Not really.
You liked me, as you wanted me. Open and exposed.
Vulnerable to the bone. You liked me without my flesh-without the protection of my form. I was pleasant without my shelter, naked and alone. I was for you? Pleasurable? Or another passing fruit? Was I worth my demise, did you savour the time?
I feel like you must, who else lives up to my touch.
I am undeniable in my truth. I take over you but you make into a joke- someone that lives alone. Pushed aside to the furthest or the centrepiece but never allowed to be free, unless you were ready to devour me.
No one wanted to see, what it really felt like to be me. I am more than rough- I am what longs to be touched. I am more than spikes. I am a mountain of sharp petals that rose from the ground. My mother was the delicious sound of raindrops falling down. I am the sun. When you opened me up you could see, how my nectar does not bleed it dreams. My skin was my true reality.
I wonder what else you can’t believe.
You violated me.
Peeled me into shreds.
Turning my roots, to branches.
My skin found ways to breathe.
Sucking on your misery.
Pleasuring your body.
Left me naked.
Pulled me from the skin.
Pulled me from past sins.
I could see,
The beast within me,
The beast of you,
You feed.
You lie.
You chain.
The pain an excuse,
to call me other names.
I cower,
Afraid to look into your eyes
To afraid to see,
How much misery loves company.
I have been thinking a lot about fear and how it alters perception. What does it mean to live in fear? How does this connect and alter our connections to other persons and how does it limit our capacity to love? I feel that if you have a large amount of fear in your body, then it is impossible to love with the depth and thoughtfulness of space and becoming. Whatever you are afraid of, will lynch and suffocate the beings you love, whether consciously or unconsciously you are limited and tied to the beliefs that you hold inside your body. What do you hold inside your body? How does it feel to breathe as you?
What does it mean for you to love the persons you are in community with? Does fear dictate your heart- loss and grief- or hope and becoming? There is no shame or right answer in this but I feel it’s the knowledge of knowing that this is what you are giving. We are here to be in love with one another and we are here to imagine new possibilities of living. This may not be possible if you believe you can imagine what another person can be. Knowing the limit of your imagination is leaving space the infiniteness of the cosmos aka your loved ones.
This year has shown us what lives beyond our control. Everything and Everyone deserves the space to breathe. To imagine as ourselves; without apology- without conditions. If you call them home and family, trust their vision to reveal a space that gives love rather than fear. But don’t forget yourself as you do. The compass, the recognition that lives inside you may pave new paths and light new ways.
They came in the shadows. Lurking behind every happy moment and corner. They came in the shadows haunting me- turning me into a time machine of their horror, of their pain.
I am left once again without a name.
Begging for a space to breathe.
I bend till my knees bleed.
They tell me,
Please forgive me.
Confession No1.
I / 8/ SELF
Voiced by Moonstar
Written by E.V.E
I am losing my love, the one I seek.
I am losing my love. The one I need.
The one I know.
The one I grow.
I am losing my love. The one that breathes.
I am losing my love- the one that says.
‘ It will be okay.’
‘ It will be fine.’
‘ You can fly.’
‘ You are beautiful inside.’
‘ Don’t listen to the horrors inside your M.I.N.D’
We will find beauty in a new way.
We will find beauty in a new truth.
The beauty lives in Y.O.U.
Y.O.U can’t lose this bloom.
Remember I am here with you.
I am losing my way.
I have lost the door.
I have lost the key.
I am within the trees.
I am within the roots.
I am within you.
I can’t see.
Who will I be?
Who will survive?
This fading disguise.
I open my eyes,
to endless sky.
I see dreams.
The voices have disappeared
All that is left is M.E.
A beast with a wondering disease.
I feed on vulnerability.
I feed on pain.
I feed on truth.
I feed on blame.
I feed on desire.
I feed on Y.O.U
I feed my roots,
With nourishing truths.
Nourishing my soil,
Nourishing my name,
I am a process of change.
Discarding. Decomposing. Disintegrating.
Evaporating.
Fading.
Changing.
I break through,
To see,
Nothing but M.E.
Beyond my chains,
There is being with freedom in its veins
Beyond my chains,
There is a being with love at its core.
Beyond my chains,
I am no more.
I am the volcanic floor.
I am the tide.
I am the changing sky.
I am being that has learnt to fly.
I am being that has learnt to fly.
I am alive.
Photography by ndidi iroh
I love how she holds my hand. Tightening her grasp whenever a strange or peculiar figure wonders past, all figures that hold clean haircuts and ironed trousers are peculiar to her and this made me love her even more.
She holds the same understanding that I have, we are the universe. Everything we wanted and could ever imagine was within our grasp if we just pondered, skipped and speed towards it without hesitation or scepticism. Our dark bodies are not a limitation but a burning unknown that frightened all arenas of the world, even our own kind.
This is why, I fell in love with her and this is why she fell in love with herself. Her becoming self was nothing I could hold and my becoming self was nothing she could comprehend. She liked to remind me of this fact whenever she caught my gaze loitering on her lips. She is as mysterious and illusive as the ocean itself. A destination for adventurous explorers and relaxed souls but the only permanent residents are those born in its depths and the dead that found themselves abandoned there.
She is committed and dedicated to understanding me the same way parents hope to love their children better than they were loved. I was her one family, friend and partner in the world and when we walked down the street she made sure I never skittered in front of any passer- by. We deserved as much space as anyone else and we had to begin with a confident unwavering stride.
You must live in the world you want and not the world they created. ‘They’ being everyone who was afraid of being the ocean. She had a cliché and motto for everything and could turn almost every sad sensation into a poetic wondering. Of course her own pain was exempt, she is a poet stitched into warrior flesh and she belonged to no one and thus she was everything we had.
Love Always
Ocean
You feel pleasant.
Pleasantly strange.
Foreign, in all the imaginable ways,
Isolation and regret
Lace your fingertips.
You tell me you like me like this.
Alone.
You like, alone.
You like to have me, to yourself.
How lucky I am.
How fortune, I am.
To have someone like you.
ii.
I like you.
The forest of you.
The danger you entail.
It smells,
Familiar.
Childish giggles stich my lips together.
Closed, frames create fences.
You prevail.
Climbing over me with your broad claws,
Ripping my form.
I have nothing left.
You ignore me.
I like it rough.
Fight more.
I am in submission.
Obey.
It’s a game.
Winner takes all.
I am used to this call.
I thought she was different.
I thought she could see,
I wanted it to be her and me.
I bow to her will,
Fear used,
Like a wheel.
Rolling me into
Weak.
I kiss her flesh.
Her meat is a smell, not a taste.
It reminds me of early days.
When I still sulked on her tit,
Feeding her mould.
She bends my bones,
She stands alone,
I know she is afraid,
To afraid to say,
She knows no other game.
Except pain.
Photography by Ari Richter
Wait.
My mother used to repeat this numerous times, often with a warning and always buried within her webbed tongue. An intertwined sweetness that could weave honey but more often than not, they relayed prophetic judgments that I was too young to understand.
“Be patient. You will need to wait.”
I held onto this truth in the later years of my life but in this waiting room, I was a child. A child too young to speak but young enough to know thousands of words, that amounted to nothing said. The waiting room had plush red velvet seats and warm lighting; the corners of the room were backlit with indefinable paintings that made me feel the last moments of my life.
“Be patient. You will need to wait.”
My exact manner of being was my inability to wait; it would become an imperfection that would make me great. Patience did not need to include waiting but rather it was a by- product- of something else. A convincing lie that I had readily prepared; in order to console my constant movement. I was always prepared. I was always patient, especially in regards to my death.
II.
It was the nicest dinner made for me by someone who did not know me. An esteemed guest I was surrounded and adorned with a table filled with all the finest cheeses and meats. A gumption of heads and fleshes of all the earthly desires and fruits. Covered in delicious gravy and gulped in care, my host had done their research; they had made a feast with devour-ability on their mind.
I politely denied and informed them very meekly that I did not consume flesh and that I had lost my taste for devour-ability long ago. I nibbled and pecked at the juicy side dressings of grapes and the slices of apples carved into ringlets that surrounded the salad. I had never seen such care taken and such master ship displayed.
They kept me there for a while; burdened by my insistence that there is no other way I could be hosted or consoled. They stood up graciously and told me,
“I will remember this for next time.”
They walked me down the long corridor that seemed to curve around my being although my eyes denoted it in a linear precision. They guided me into blue hued room and told me with deftly certainty that I would need to wait until the time was right.
I waited by the adjoining door and sat comfortably crossed legged on the plush seats. The door named ‘LIVING’ was tucked into the right hand corner and was crafted with a dark material that made it look invisible to the eye. It was only after close inspection, that I could see its markings. When I was walking through, I did not catch the same inscription.
I was filled with disgrace; I hurried through. My denial and rudeness to my very hospitable host has left me with no option. I was alone once again. I placed my hand along the curved handle and pressed myself into the ‘LIVING’. Unlike the waiting the room and my host’s table, I am surrounded by food that I could eat but it held nothing in taste and was invisible in texture. The delightful details that made an apple appear like well-sliced pineapple made everything devour able but far from edible. I smiled myself into temporal life. Happy that such pleasant beasts surrounded me but disappointed that I was back on Earth once again.
III.
I was too fast. I could have waited. The waiting room was designed with my comfort in mind. Pleasure still fills my heart when I remember the paintings and the invisible door marked ‘NO’. If I had waited, I would have seen my gracious host enter and tell me that the table was clean and ready with a buffet, sculpted to my desire.