Through my writing, I am speaking to something larger than myself. I write in conversation with trans, mad, crip, and sex worker communities, and with all other marginalised peoples whose struggles are bound up with my own. I am not interested in lingering in tragedy, but rather in working through grief, shame, and disempowerment to reach a space of radical pride and joy. My work rejects pity and condescension, embracing the possibilities of marginal and marginalised bodies rather than reducing them to narrative props. I often work with myth because I want to trouble and subvert society’s aetiologies and origin stories. I want to introduce new organising elements, new ways of making sense of the world.

prognosis

Time is suddenly precious.
The hours narrow down, each moment
newly golden. The heart breaks,
reforms, breaks again into irregular
beats, seizes against malformation,
counts down against the clock.
You turn the page, resist the urge
to skip to the end. You linger in it.
Here is the tale: the wolf swallows the sun.
The other wolf works ruin on the moon,
and all the stars fall from the sky.
As the world-serpent stirs
the seas rise with icemelt,
the skies flood poison and smoke.
The god of war and thunder
battles the wyrm, slays it, takes nine steps
and falls down dead.
This was written long before his birth:
he was already bitten. The world turns.
You wake at dawn again,
drink in the sunrise bloom
of unruly lavender, soft orange
burnt through with mauve-touched
rose. How many dawns
have you slept through and missed?
How many more? You can’t breathe
with grief for lost mornings. And yet
here it is before you: the sun,
a blot of gold blurred out
by clouded violet, all shot through
with livid streaks of light,
fading quickly now, the violent hues
all bleeding back to blue.