Ghosts under water

ghosts under water
(photography + text, california, 2022)

i.

“The spiral widens farther and farther, so that the sphere of a wise woman is beyond herself,
beyond her family, beyond the human community, embracing the planet, mothering the earth.”¹

I would like to tell you a dream. A dream that arises from wet earth – there was mud, first – rains as wind on slender shoulders reaching towards the horizon and the bowl of honey gold.

I would like to tell you about my friends. My kin that have beckoned their own seeds; in a maze of time, falling into just the right places: some might call, coincidences; others, destiny… Where fresh waters hit sizzling coils and reach in smoke to tell of an arrival.

We were born with the dream; a gift of a gift-giving earth, cracked to be shared in our homes that let the past speak across their hallways, their staircases, from within their mirrors, and across their blue, purple, green, yellow murals.

There was a first home; a beginning to our story. Us, the handmade lovers, escaping the tutelage of an ever-hungry institution – that time around, a college – finding solace in the glaring excess. Our shine so bright tending to a haze of confusion that could keep the shadows away. This home had found its roots in the fertile soils of California; by then over-washed with artificial green and ornate palm trees that could barely speak a native tongue. Yet, the green does not yield to the will of the Man; green is insurgent, however its birth, it resonates into a beauty that is just too much for greed to capture. A palm beckoned our home, grown before its front door, it adorned the bluest sky. A portal one might call; from adulthood back to play, paths that had been charted for us faltering against the blows of a life – asking for more, craving for more, making more in arms that know how to hold.

I wish to invoke to you these arms; these bodies that curve into the feminine and sharpen with a masculine, and blow kisses into a fresh, purple horizon line. Those who watch the sun rise, those who know her magic and greet her glory with hunger in their eyes, legs crisscrossed, heads resting, jokes in the air, nothing but a victorious sight. When I first found my way, home, I could not yet see. Scared and broken, I called for a brief sigh of relief, of the known to stay, perhaps, unchanged. Yet soon enough, a light from my dark was reflected back by the eyes ready to love, and I asked myself what could be a life; where could we not go if love could open into unabashed, trying, faltering, and ever louder horizons?

“we can be anything we want to be!”²

Queer families hold those who crave to break; open up into futures under-attempted, often silenced, persistently feared, and pretentiously mocked. Silence is the sentence demanded by other families. The weights of unsaid grows, and fills the space between I and those who birthed me; love stretching at times too thin – too hard for me to call it by its name. I turn to my parents and ask them to believe; to see the passions I carve from the face of the earth to move a path into freedom, into light. They laugh; my mother laments over the kitchen table, “you are immature still.”

Failure; failed; growing sideways is a queer art.³

Across stands the real world, with the heft of overdone careers, churning bodies into tales resting on destruction; cash accumulating to hide the guilt of self-made kings.
They reign in forgetting the pain, the ache, the racialized slur of their presence as our future, all made to shine in magazine adds, a million-dollar smile, husband and wife beneath the altar behind an ever-lasting sun.

If all would remain silent, and watch the race unfold without a break, a temporary future, yet for how many more generations to come? Not seven.

My father passes me an empty napkin and a black point pen; “write me your plans,” he demands, “assuage my worries; tell me you will make it up up and above;” my sister comments on the side, just wait till you have a family, and you will regret not having more money. In their eager eyes, a resounding fear; they see my failure, and worries cloak their throats. Why do I not listen; what if I just become reasonable?

Reason; over-reasoned, the logic of this kingdom – the mind that moves the path – the answer should be simple.
Not for the killjoy.⁴
The queer seed stuck into the coils of the machine; smoke coming and unrelenting, give in give in and we could not; for the sun hits my desiring flesh and I know there is more than lust more than the shameful joys of transgressing lines; there is deep knowledge, moving from my bones, centuries of songs echoing behind closed eyes.

The erotic, as Lorde would have it, “the chaos of our strongest feelings,”⁵ leading us back and forth towards home.

ii.

“giving into the fear of feeling . . . is a luxury only the unintentional can afford,
and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.”⁶

Worlds cannot be made alone. In believing, there is always the risk of losing sight. For walls are heavy and they rise; from day break to dawn voices race for you to give up.

Dreaming is scary. Eyes open, life enters, but denial stinks and sticks – who am I to chase change; who am I to believe that I can escape; who am I to trust the darkened paths?

Not an I that could ever stand alone.

I met my lovers at the fresh age of nineteen. eight years after, we are coiled, sprawling branches into roots extending towards water, light. We move in our own rhythms: letting life and chasing under-defined feeling, gifts of our queer families...

In the first year of our arms tangling onto staircases, blinded by new lights I asked how – how could love be so generous? How could these bodies seek to see me all of me hold me and let me glide into shapes I could not dare give myself alone. In a year, my hair lost its fresh, male cut and messed into weirder forms; circles over lines, while clothes started to get loose and expand into angles – me taking space; bags of new attempts – music filling our lungs, hand-picked and blossomed by a lover for lovers, dinner for all thirty-five oozing from an industrial kitchen, love in her many forms; care, its central tongue.

Bring us with us, is the cryptic slogan of our home. There is no us without us; no I that is not already a “singular plural” of us, you moving into my folds to grow me in tension and tandem, you changing in my parts, we are bound unbounded in love gifting this dance, as we extend, together; you let me free and us remain, us coming along, us seeking homes; not alone, there is light; bring us.

To hope is to trust to hope is to be willing to take a risk and jump into an abyss of potential lives unlike the tastes, sights, scents grown accustomed in the darkening centuries. And hope is not worn valiantly; it is not a martyr’s medal nor a king’s sweet dream; hope grows from what bodies, desiring bodies, alive bodies, seeking bodies, make happen together
in the underground, the alleyways, hearts of the night, or soft arms in an afternoon’s light.

I speak of a collective, a family of trees growing into a forest. Trees of purple, blue, green, and brown

amidst high-rises and paved nothingness-es, reproducing themselves over the surface of our mother. Blocks and blocks of the same, flashy lights, branded insides, bodies walking in and out, gleaning eyes, drenched words, urban jungle fallen into a flat note. We might call it gentrification, or the ever- lasting hunger of colonial dispossession, accruing land for finite glories of a human experiment. Names might change, but directions remain; my native land, turkey, looking more and more as this stolen plane; my native land a stolen land; each nation a genocidal story of dispossession, converging under an imperialist light. Looking the part in our modern fairy tale, IMF and World Bank, Reagan and Thatcher, Columbus and constitution; browned teeth from cigar smoke, yachts kept on Italian shore, and cycles of kitchen renovations.

All dreams are a delusion; we live only in fantasies, but under your feet lies the death who always speaks;
you demand of silence,
we know the time has come.

for roots crack, however many hands refashion the ground to make leather soles walk in the accustomed pace; roots rise and crack.
Asphalt returning into rocks, ores meeting the brown sunlight, clovers peaking from a new ecosystem; if you focus deep within, there is already another life.

Our forest does not hide.

Let me tell you a dream.

iii.

“Any one knows that rowing is dangerous.
Be alright. Be careful. Be angry. Say what you think.”⁷

This is a map. A map that is built of circles and cycles. Each edge meets the beginning, and grows with the rhythms passed across generations.

This is a convergence. It is not a story that belongs to me. Instead, I am gifted the vessel of experiencing the sensations that have been with us across all time. My friends, my queer family have been my teachers, guides, light. They lead me out of the footsteps into the heart of the world; “[w]e spill over into the world and the world spills over into us.”⁸

In communion there is a return into growth.

We try languages that have become foreign to our tongue; we cast our bodies into the milky Bay of the coast Miwok; pushing and pulling fatigued arms, wet, cold, and afraid, as all unguided waves seek a return to the brightest lighthouse we make a temporary wish for the sweet comfort of a known house. Instead, we are urged to taste the fire, press our feet into the forgiving mud, and let it cover our shoes, pants, shirts, hair; no part untainted
from life into life.

Five bodies, this time, rippling into history; grey waters turn into opal, amethysts rain from behind the fog; we let go to love again. There is a thin line from suffering to ecstasy between the night’s brazen whisper and the morning’s welcoming lust. I grab a branch unburnt in our cradled fire; I let her sink into me and release myself into her enchanted songs. I spin off from the known universe, and open my eyes to Anna, Marie, Tessa, Tina calming the tendrils, planting us back onto grassy hills, overlooking the shadowless Pacific. We speak about love, about the webs that extend from our first home, into this home by the water. We name the suffering, the ache, the lost ones, pasts that haunt too close, we dream to grasp our family and shake them into presence “you have given us so much.”

Sitting here,

five fresh stalks, barnacles,

lichens into a willow, sand into glass, we are mirrors into everything we are made out of.

So why can’t we just pull the weights of your feet, of our feet and flow into the Ocean, and back in with the rhythms?

No rock moves without intention, no story comes to a close without patience the map was not meant to be final; each hand that touches write over a cryptic new poetry.

Listen with your heart and not your eyes, we rowed to the edge of the world to return where we began wind collects homes and spreads them onto a shore; across from the fire is the barren hills of human encampment,

where we burn

in cold openness there is a jungle, earth carved onto itself, pines sprawling over, forms co-mingling into shine to tell stories of excess. Five bodies remember, commit, unfurl…

I could not have risked it alone I would have been lost, under the waters, or folded into a temporary miracle awaiting the sun to rise again. You made me grab the hounds, children at play, we remain in balance – it is a matter of seeing, “the organic symmetry of forms belongs together . . . bring your gift to the world and receive the gifts of others, and there will be enough for all.”⁹

Sisters, my sisters, I call you forth

Lay your barren spine on an ancient rock

Let the stories arrive as clear as desire’s rise

We are welcomed into this gift; it is always our turn

to give.

Notes:
1. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants 97 (2013).
2. This quote is the final lines repeated in multimedia artist Tourmaline’s video work, Salacia. See Tourmaline & Thomas Jean Lax, Anything We Want to Be: Tourmaline’s Salacia, MoMa (Jun. 25, 2020), https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/360.
3. I encountered the term “growing sideways” in the tile of Kathyrn Bond Stockton’s 2009 book; The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. This side-way-ness of growth articulates queerness as a form and a direction; an oblique orientation, as Sara Ahmed would have it. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others 67 (2006). When “one thing is ‘out of line,’ then it is not just that thing appears oblique, but the world itself might appear on a slant, which disorients the picture and even unseats the body.” Id. Daring to walk on uneven ground, to walk upside down is to materialize a queer direction, which in the eyes of the normative world, is a loss, a failure, an immaturity. For the queer, willful subjects, however, in the oblique turn lies “other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being.” Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure 88 (2011).
4. Sara Ahmed, Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects), S&F Online (2010), https://sfonline.barnard.edu/polyphonic/print_ahmed.htm.
5. Audre Lorde, The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, in Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches 105 (2007).
6. Id.
7. Gertrude Stein, Lifting Belly (Rebecca Mark, ed. 1995).
8. Kimmerer (103).
9. Kimmerer (132).