How do you build a home amid the everyday dread of apocalyptic ecocide roaring fascistic horror across screens?

LA County is on fire. Roses grow from cracks in concrete, but they don’t survive street sweeps. Today the cops arrested a man for sleeping in the alley behind my apartment, according to neighbors bickering about HOA fees on WhatsApp, while incarcerated workers just miles north of my exit on the freeway try to contain flames.

Moral outrage over the plight of imprisoned firefighters is framed as wage theft, obscuring its real stakes: that people held captive by the state prefer hard labor over the hard time of carceral punishment. Time wasn’t meant to be a grave.

Liberals want to better compensate providers of this sinister social service, not to challenge the fact of human caging. Captive people aren’t allowed to abet authorities in disaster relief if they’re convicted arsonists, or, without a doubt, political prisoners—who get singled out for solitary. Consider Russell Maroon Shoatz, the Black radical visionary who spent nearly half a century caged, and decades isolated alone in a cell for 23 hours a day. Physically, not spiritually. But the spirit realm is inseparable from the material environment. He passed 52 days after his so-called compassionate release. The state continues its carnage. And yet.

His legacy lives on in the actions of communities refusing the law of capital, organizing mutual aid, and hungering for a world where—to quote another Black radical thinker—safety is not forged through “chains and corpses.” James Baldwin, luminous as ever, sits atop a cloud, gesticulating with a cigarette. The house was always burning, he sighs. Ash falls from the sky, but it isn’t his.

The world is on fire, and politicians yawn. Oops, shrugs the mayor feasting on flesh, police are our preferred first responders. Flames cremate and cops patrol for supposed looters as kindling for cages. Every time someone laments the alleged looting absent an accounting of structural plunder, my eyes flash lightning. I think, they must know nothing of settler colonialism. Greed they get, but not an elemental human hunger.

Listen. The earth doesn’t move aside for ambulances. Windstorms can’t be stopped by bullets. You can try to destroy the wild, but you’ll never conquer it.

In the interregnum, climate change deniers sharpen their knives. During his last days in office, Biden unsurprisingly proposed another arms sale, of $8 billion, to continue funding genocide. Trump plots to roll back environmental protections and regulations. As if rich people’s houses aren’t burning, too.

Crisis is an inherent condition of capitalism, which grimly reaps disaster dividends from the Palisades to Palestine. The authorities mitigate their own monsters. Death tolls rise while the state criminalizes activists chanting burn it down across prison walls. But people vested with the power to criminalize are the ones sanctioning mass destruction. From their infinity pools they see nothing but a limitless edge, vanishing ecosystems into dollar signs.

Still, smoke rises.

***

Soon after I moved to Virginia in 2015, a queer astrologer tells me I am searching for home, that it may not be attached to a geographical location. My heart beats defeat for a moment because I thought I wanted to settle down, to put down roots, finally. But not here.

As a child I wanted to be a geomorphologist, studying how rivers and roads alter the earth’s surface over time. After a life of wandering, invariably arriving or departing, I can’t stay in one place. It’s the curse of my astrological trajectory, with a Sagittarius stellium always in motion. I so desire a container for my life, a person or place to give form to restless searching. But according to my birth chart, I’m a fire blazing. A night baby born under a Sagittarius moon.

Then the astrologer tells me all containers break.

I begin building with metaphors and semicolons and ampersands—a shared syntax for lost children connecting constellations of ellipses. We find each other when, like the Postal Service song that reminds me of falling in love at 18, the freckles in our eyes align. That frightening, frantic desire to see and be seen. Unadorned. Whole.

***

A month after moving to Long Beach at the end of 2023, I spent my birthday in the hospital, where I awoke from anesthesia to texts and FaceTime calls from loved ones and, if I’m being honest, luxuriated in the feeling of being forced to rest, of being cared for so completely, relieved of any pressure to perform, produce, please. I am pathologically bad at asking for help; case in point, I didn’t tell my family I was in the hospital. But there, under starchy sheets, I didn’t feel like a burden; I remember the sweetness of nurses adjusting my pillows, serving me trays of apple juice in waxy cups and little packs of saltines, comfort food for me. I don’t want to romanticize pain, but in that moment it pushed me to revel in unexpected pleasures, unlikely intimacies.

***

Windows surround my hospital bed, enveloping the room in a purple haze. The night shift nurse brings me extra saltines. I gleefully crinkle thin plastic wrappers.

Adjusting the bed, she asks what I do for a living. I explain that I’m about to resign from my tenured job as an English professor and start stripping again. Anyone who knows me also knows I didn’t say it so succinctly, as a linear trajectory: professor to stripper. She holds space for my ambling story, tells it back to me with a sexier ending, one that makes me feel brave instead of batshit crazy.

Serene egg white and gray speckled tiles absorb our laughter. Sharp lines soften. She opens up about a recent heartbreak. I relate to her, share how I thought I’d be family planning right now with a man who couldn’t be bothered to be present for my previous two birthdays. Whose response to any compliment I paid him was a haughty “I know.” This robbed me of my favorite currency. To lift my spirits when I’m down, I like to compliment every person I pass on the street.

I feel a familiar ache in my rib, but the warmth of her words rocks me to sleep.

***

It is one of those nights. There’s a room full of pale patrons passively enjoying the entertainment—apparently oblivious or indifferent to the fact that when no one is tipping, the entertainment is not only working for free, but dancing in debt to the club. The cover charge is nothing next to a stripper’s house fee.

Glistening on stage, shoulders spinning gravity, I spot someone gawking at the tip rail before gingerly smoothing out two single dollars atop marble—as if that entitles him to more of my body. I reach for my bikini top and put it back on with my back turned to the audience, isolating my left glute then my right, back and forth bouncing bored while I secure the string. I disappear down a staircase the second the song ends.

As I survey the room deciding which group to approach, I realize I’m accidentally lurking behind a young man who keeps glancing back at me. He must be at least 21 to be here but looks to me like a preteen. Despite writing him off, at this point I’m basically standing directly behind him, so I strut a few feet forward and squat down to his level.

“Boo!” I laugh, then apologize for hovering as I register his facial expression. I remember reading somewhere that it only takes a split second for the brain to clock sexual attraction to a stranger, at least in a superficial sense. I don’t know if science backs this claim, but it holds up to experience; in a sliver of time I sense the spark or its absence.

I extend my right hand while gazing into his flickering eyes, which confirm I can make a deal with his desire. Every performer has their limit and mine is a limp wrist. He accepts my firm shake. He’ll get a dance, even if it means borrowing money from some sulky friend.

I’m not wrong. He wants me to take him back to VIP. He’s practically melted onto my chair. But just as we’re about to get up, he pauses. “Wait, can you turn around, let me have a look?”

I guess I appear confused, despite having heard this line countless times, so he adds with a smirk, “I wanna try before I buy.”

This is standard, expected, really, considering how common it is to reduce others to a number on the slippery scale of desirability. These days, AI bots set the bar and mere mortal is mid. Android is in. The tautology of technology as erotic driver. Pay for plastic with plastic. Your face has face value. What’s the price of your piece of ass when you’re property? Doctors spout a cost-benefit analysis on YouTube, while bloggers perform surgery on social capital. Shrink yourself. Make it look natural but remember: Your name is a number. Your body is merchandise.

I know that I should play my part, giggle, stand up with shoulder blades kissing, as tall as a doorway or carousel ride. Spin, shimmy, make money.

Instead, I consider the cost of letting a man half my age parade my ass around like a show pony.

I remember as a baby stripper in Virginia, a regular remarked, in earnest, “They treat y’all like cattle here. They should treat you like…” He pauses, searching. “Thoroughbred horses!”

I am a show, a pony, a part, a piece, a washing machine. A frayed electrical wire. A fuse. An angel with wings of bone. A gargoyle. A tripped circuit breaker. A faucet dripping. I fight off tongues flicked between my splayed breastbone, fingers feeling for hard nipples, hands sliding down my sweaty spine.

“No, I’m not going to do that,” I state matter-of-factly. With the sharp incline of elbows I push myself off the rolling chair and slow-motion gallop away.

The next hour or more I stand around, still striking out, feeling a bit foolish, looking forlornly toward the front entrance. I remind myself you only need one decent customer to have a decent night. Over and over, like a mantra. Meanwhile, the guy I rejected takes cash out of the ATM twice for a dancer who scrolls between VIP sessions, bored, not even trying to feign affection or make conversation. I glare in his direction. He looks bored, too.

When I finally find my guy, and I sure as hell do, bored guy glares back. I know, there’s still a man on both sides of the equation. I’m not naïve. And yet.

Maybe this man realizes that I bet on myself as more than a ratio, a ration, an assemblage of legs and ass and tits and waist. That he failed to see me as fully human; or worse, he did and couldn’t afford the price of the ticket—a shrinking profit margin.

I alchemize the feeling into a lesson. For the rest of the night I beam at the man as if I don’t recognize his face. I know that tomorrow, I won’t.

***

Share Napkin Manifestos

After resigning from my university post at the beginning of January 2024, almost exactly one year ago, and during a time in which I felt fundamentally unsafe in my body, I fought tooth and nail for the new life I wanted to live. Now that I’m here, I sometimes feel too exhausted to enjoy it. Not that I’m ungrateful, but I am far from the financial stability I seek. So I have to keep running up that hill, Kate Bush interpretive dance style—all flailing arms, wild hair, pouty lips, and melodramatic angles.

This is often how I feel at work, like a baroque pop specter, but most nights I love being on stage. Here, my mind feels unburdened of daunting expectations and my own perfectionistic demands. I float through the air with inverted legs fanned like a pinwheel. I am poised for the body’s miracles. I walk on air with the magic trick of taut arms sustaining tension—and with the aid of a strength specific to strippers, despite or perhaps because of how often we’re underestimated, presumed directionless.

It takes guts to put so much trust in your body when the world is upside down.

***

You wanted, too desperately, to be a mother—almost unbearably so—after the fiery young organizer who had called you mom tragically died, alone in her bedroom. Estranged from your body, you cannot mourn.

***

A month ago to the day, I had to cancel my birthday plans. If it hadn’t been for a dear friend surprising me with flowers, a balloon, and some really delicious takeout, I probably would have spent my day on the couch rewatching Clueless, sobbing uncontrollably when Ms. Guist and Mr. Hall share a coffee thermos. Not sporadically, hormones seize my body. I’m a sad sponge. Something as silly as my beloved cat’s persistent meows every morning as I prepare her food, with love but never fast enough, can make me burst into tears. “I’m trying so hard,” I cry. I’m not talking to her. Comically emo but genuinely so. I know my big emotions seem absurd at best or manipulative at worst. But the truth is that no matter how hard I try, I struggle to regulate my very real emotional and sensory sensitivity, especially during my period.

I am so lucky to have generous friends who understand I feel deeply, see my effort and celebrate my growth, encourage me to honor my body’s idiosyncratic needs. To sit with rather than shove down the grief. I scribble fragments of ideas on scrap paper and sob into voice notes between sentences that demand something of me.

Writing ghosts out of your apartment can be exhausting. They keep you up at night. But ghosts usher in rebirth, are doulas of new narratives. If a ghost talks to you, listen.

***

I dance in my kitchen like an off-brand Teletubby, a little stoned and swaddled in a fuzzy leopard bathrobe. The dramatic contrast between the image of me dancing for money versus dancing for myself suddenly strikes me as hilarious. My laughter is mostly a silent, occasionally shrieky, full body shrug in stop animation.

My cat’s pink paws are delicately placed right where tile meets wood flooring. She watches politely, mostly unbothered, a faint trace of confusion in the tiny triangle of her mouth. I sing loudly into a serving spoon.

She is not clawing at ghosts in the walls. I hate that when I met her in an animal shelter in 2016, her former keeper, who named her Marsha, had partially amputated her digits. I worry about her phantom pain, the collateral damage of prize property. When I adopt her that day, I give her a new name, one that fits.

Aside from my cat, my only audience is the kitchen trashcan, which I randomly glued googly eyes on and gave an entire personality during one of my redecoration kicks.

I named my trashcan Fred before I met a human Fred, incidentally the name of my octogenarian regular. I joke that I manifested him. He pays me to dance with him in crisp $100 bills. With, not on, him.

He is a west coast swing dancer but loves to move no matter the form: the Lindy Hop, or the waltz, polka, country, salsa, cumbia, merengue. When the VIP is otherwise empty, we stand in the center of the room and dance across partitions, my left hand resting on his upper arm and my right intertwined with his fingers. Inevitably, the spell is broken by some dude in a backwards hat and the dancer carting him around with fed up mom energy. We laugh at our unseemly intimacy and retreat to the corner booth where we don’t have to yell quite as loudly over speakers. His hearing has waned with age and mine is delayed like out-of-sync subtitles, so I don’t mind when he repeats the same stories. They’re often quite sweet.

One tired Monday, though, I’m on autopilot and revert to scripted intimacy, knees straddling the squeaky seat. His arms braced against each partition wall, he suddenly shouts “Stop!”

I stop. My mind is elsewhere but it’s a simple command, not calculus. He explains his fear that I will give him a heart attack. That’s a good way to go, he adds, but he’s not ready.

“I’m not done dancing,” he says with a toothy grin I find endearing.

I’m not done either.

***

When Fred asks, innocently, if I ever want children, he reassures the tell in my eyes I have plenty of time. He thinks I’m 29, a decade younger than my actual age. Salt burns, but it cleans, too.

For most of my 30s I wanted, desperately, to be a mother, even more desperately after the surgeon who performed my pre-pandemic appendectomy in 2018 informed me my fallopian tubes had significant scarring, the cause of which was the actual reason I began puking green bile after driving myself to the emergency room. I have a high pain tolerance and the tattoos to prove it—plus the menstrual cramps to test it—but the abrupt stabbing sensation was so severe I thought I might be having a heart attack.

Immediately after checking my vitals in an intake room, hospital staff hooked me up to an ECG machine to record my heart’s electrical signals. Unsurprisingly the attack was of the panic variety. So I awaited more test results, hearing every sound in the cacophony of crisis, horizontal behind flimsy cubicle curtains—save for a scatological showdown fit for a Jonathan Swift satire. Picture a policeman guarding the ER’s only bathroom, locked by default, and a hard femme in a hospital gown rushing toward him like a bat out of hell after meeting a motley crew of enemas. The way I see it, the cop lost, but I was relieved to be admitted to an en suite on the inpatient floor. The doctor ordered test after test after test before finally, without warning, rushing me to the OR on a stretcher.

Still groggy from surgery, I was gutted when the doctor broke the news about my scarred fallopian tubes, nonchalantly, as if placing a lunch order. When I tried to ask questions, he brusquely told me to follow up with my ob-gyn. The infection itself was easily cured with antibiotics, but it wreaked havoc on my body for as long as it remained undetected. Meaning, for as long as my then boyfriend failed to mention his indiscretion.

My heart a live wire, I left the hospital in a state of shock, unable to process an imminent breakup—not to mention the terrible revelation that precipitated it—and with medical debt where my appendix should be. Widely considered a vestigial organ, the appendix, according to recent research, serves an adaptive immune function.

Unrelated to my lying (soon-to-be) ex situation, a man I thought was a friend tried to force himself on me the night before I drove myself to the ER.

***

You run into him at a metal show and he offers to drive you home since you inexplicably start feeling off. When he insists on coming up to use your bathroom, you instinctively ask him to wait, then cave. But your physical strength surprises even you, a scrappy athlete nicknamed Violent Femme in high school.

After finally shoving him out the door and double-checking the deadbolt with shaky hands, you fall to the floor and weep. You never see him again, but his face is everywhere. Each man who hurt you is a domino is a haunted house of cards is a memory.

***

You start to notice when you unconsciously switch to second person.

During an undergrad summer research project on second person fiction, which fascinates me to this day, I read that the you is often a projection of judgment, like the voice of a parent or a god punishing a child. Thou hast done wrong reverberates through the thunder of your mind. You’re to blame, you mistakenly believe, the sole architect of your suffering.

Another weird thing I’ve learned about trauma is that if I dance really wildly when I’m stuck in a memory, I can get out of it. I can return myself to my body.

***

As nightfall casts new shadows, I sit in my own little sanctuary. Over the course of the past year, I built a home for my sometimes terrifying and exhilarating new life. I’ve been sick a lot, with COVID and the flu and walking pneumonia, but there is a new calmness in me. Less doomscrolling, more staring out windows. Mental space for wonder. Room to listen.

The light bulbs in the iron candelabra chandelier above my writing desk flicker like gas flames. A helium-filled balloon slowly turns toward the lights, spinning on an invisible axis. I feel the pull of its quiet urging.

***

Somewhere between getting dumped over the phone by the man who called me his future wife, and resigning from my first and last salaried job after a ruinous cross-country move, freezing my eggs became a logistical and financial impossibility.

But this isn’t a sad story. New desires grew in me.

Dancing in my kitchen, happy tears limn my eyes as I remember recently teaching my niece an improvised move I dub the pickle dance, arms wiggling up to heaven. Being an aunt is one of the greatest joys of my life, bringing me even closer to my beautiful sister.

The love I feel for them, for my fur baby and all animals, for all the people close to me, and far away, is immense. This love extends to all the pleasures that glimmer—sea salt, the ocean, hazelnut chocolate, a new song, a perfect kiss like a wave, a perfect sentence. Sometimes it, the love, but also the loss it begets, spills over into the street below my balcony. I want to embrace every stranger, to snuggle up to a friend, to move and be moved, to write little love notes on napkins and toss them skyward like dollars, making it rain poems that float toward their as-yet-unknown home.

***

Meanwhile, wildfires still rage in the city of angels. I write this sentence to the sound of sirens in a failed state of emergency alerts. I am a nervous system, a body without organs, a body in a larger body of faulty and defiant hearts, all pounding pavement.

I once called LA home. Homes are ghost stories that shelter the living. Longer or no longer. The incalculable loss of it all is hard to hold. And yet.

Slowly, new topographies, incandescent bodies, take shape. At night we pray our ghosts will witness a new world being born, the one we—not gods or celebrities or billionaires or politicians—are working together to create.

Like the world for one moment stopping to say I’m here. 

Language is born in us but sometimes forgets

how much we need a pause between words 

where minutes mourn 

how long they’ve accepted less. 

How much we want to crawl into the beds under our tongues 

and sing to everything still.

♡♡♡