Who is teaching us

to weather the wound

lying that the wound is “weather,”

as though we must whether it

without asking why it rains?

excerpt from Untitled piece, 2026

-Gazi

Sand dunes incanting.

A Blooming dune.

Unsilenced.

The iris keeps watch.

Light passing through, 

Lingering, 

luminous

offerings for an infinite view.

Colors assumed.

Colors conjured.

a colossal supercontinent 

lives in their faith,

Invisible strings challenge 

time on its view of fate,

Fossils offshore.

Bones with good memory.

Coastlines fit together.

The sea between them.

Moving.

a migrant with coasts in her mouth.

Shore on her tongue.

Every fragment

looking for its edge.

Coastlines fit together,

The silent scripting of scent.

Translucent transcribing.

our lives, an allegory of attraction.

People cross oceans for a shoreline.

Cross oceans for each other.

Color me blind.

Let me recognize it.

What never 

stopped recognizing me.

The recognizing, it 

never stops. 

Precolonial sentiments seeping 

in my tea.

Still seeping.

I sip.

The heart beckons

with its needs.

I must answer to everything in me.

-Gazi

6/25/26

Sometimes

I love a flower

I want to pin it to my chest

like a flag torn from the ruins of a lost land

wear it as evidence that I’ve been feeling

that I’ve survived this age of spectacle

What’s with all this surviving?

I consume it like sugar hoarded during wartime

boil it down to syrup

bathe in its sweetness

let it be the first thing on my tongue at the dawn of revolution

I want to become its fragrance,

Thread it into a garment,

wrap the world in it as a silken reminder

that beauty is here within these fences drawn

Can I hang it from the highest peak?

Proclaim a new era under its petals,

Declare:

I have seen softness survived the machine.

I would sit alone beneath it,

sulking in my patriotism,

as if devotion where uniform I could wear,

as if love could make me sovereign.

A wise friend said if you love the flower,

leave it alone.

you did not colonize its bloom,

you must let the petals fall

without rushing to make a poem from the silence

you become still enough to hear a miracle

humming inside the stem

anxiety is the echo of war

still playing on loop

in the background of our breath

and we starve

because of an Earth made profitable

and love, transactional

still this flower gives

you cannot buy your way back into belonging

you must recall your name before profit had a tongue

I am made from those who fed strangers

and their existence undocumented

deed without translation

I love louder, the thump of my efforts

imprints last forever

back into the soil we’ll go

only the brave fall all the way inward

the emptied are those who become conduits

I leave the flower

I let it exist.

It’s wild boom takes roots in my reason

without my fingerprints on its meaning

in that unmaking…

I bloom.

8/10/25

-Gazi

I am the forest

you breathe 
 an Amazonian tree
 dragging water from the buried dark,
 lifting it leaf by leaf 
back into the sky of your body, 
clouding the space between us 
 until what falls on you
is made of what you gave me.

3/8/25

Genealogy of the Living Wound

I was born the second coming to my bloodline,
child of Ra, 
North Star to a feral woman 
growling softly, seeking vacation from a loveless life.

Behind his eyes…an underworld. 
It drew her, Oya, 
she desired a storm to unveil her own.

There came me 
a lightning strike, hazardously obstructive, 
a roaring cry holding mirrors to vacant tunnels, 
revealing how dark it truly gets.

She would not bear to hold me long. 
I was a red river, and she sang the blues, 
She said: this child is a spell 
and I cannot confront the caster.

Her body was a battlefield, 
and my father a fire
burned her into disappearing.

I sought for her, 

for she would be my familiar place,

the place that I returned to for refuge 
where delight passed through Earth’s quiet chambers,
undercurrents spoke in curiosity, 
and moss continued to be a good friend.

I used my claws to grasp the soil, 
climbed rocks to meet the Goddess 
in the Jupiter hour.

I bathed in the wettest of waters, 
offering gratitude for its cooling, 
leaving traces of sweet secretion 
the first honey, 
a sweetness unknown to mankind.

I was ravenous for love 
And so I loved, 

I loved with soul ache, 
with bloodlust toward instruments 
that only know dissonance.

I walk a city where the ground splits

just to remind us 
there is life beneath it, 
concrete tends to forget.

How easy it is to forget you are alive 
when death scores your morning stroll.

Pleasure 
dances just out of reach, 
I’m as close as I'll ever come.

Good morning, my love 
forbidden desire lays on me in sleep paralysis, 
threatening me with a kiss.

Look out the window. 
See what has become of you.

The trees have lost their bark 
and still they threaten to stand.

Look. 
See who’s still standing.

There is no escaping 
the civilization I am mother to.

4/14/24

-Gazi

A world that keeps turning inside itself,

a mouth of contrasts,

beauty ripening

right beside decay.

My joy has been

salted with sorrow.

Marked

in the colors of a story gone untold,

dye deep into the fabric of me,

waiting within me to be

spoken softly in the dark,

whispered to an old friend,

then rising

a sudden flame in the throat

of the one known for silence.

Confronted with injustice,

quiet learns the quake of her own voice.

The heart unbuttons

what was certainly stitched closed.

People love

the way they ache to be loved.

You can feel it

the reaching,

the pouring.

We pour from thirst,

from vessels both awash

and scraped thin.

The lust for drinking

to escape being drenched,

only to discover

we were always

inside the ocean.

No one quite knows

what lies at the bottom

until the depths

are made known.

The forest

buries its brilliance.

Roots disappear

only to spend their lives

feeding one another.

Rivers

keep giving themselves away,

never once

becoming less river.

I am learning

from mountains,

how to wait,

how to stay

when every part of me

wants to disappear.

How many times

does the body have to remember

before we listen?

It is here.

I swear

it is here.

12/28/24

-Gazi

And I’ve found

myself most identified

with the tear,

a soft traveler down my cheek,

gracing me

with the holiness of shrinkage.

A baptism in smallness.

It’s only here

in the narrowing

that your breath reaches me.

like wind making a song

through the bones of my spine.

You hum me whole.

There is no place

where we are not,

your presence curled

in the hollow of my ribs,

my breath

a prayer inside your mouth.

Still,

I scramble

for a border

My shadow studies the script

of a well-lived life,

reads it aloud

to the morning light

that spills like grace

across the foot of my bed,

as wind chimes

speak to me beauty.

I think of you then,

Your absence

shapes my wanting

into worship.

There are days

when the longing

feels like union,

like desire

has your fingerprints

and there still pressed

against my skin.

And maybe

this is the cruelest kind of intimacy,

to be sculpted

by what will not come back.

Good grief,

you were never in vain.

You are

the quiet

I have been answering

my whole life.

9/4/23 11:11pm -Gazi

She is plutonic

grasping on to the depth of all

hoping that she won't fall out of place,

and expose the lack of grace that surrounds her existence

Is it that eye fear leaving the abyss?

knowing that the surface requires me to exist

without pain

you might call that the mundane

but my ability to see all that is restrained

is the very thing that keeps me

welcoming the rain

and the toxins in the water keep the illusions the same

manifesting cycles to remind me why I came

to learn love, not the depicted complacency

that has me running from experiences

that are anchoring me

hoping to try on skins,

eye emerge from diving in,

there's something about a union

that forces me into my yin

but the echoes of my life,

make me cultivate that within

scared exchange with my past

I've gained from what's been

my essence you cannot pin

I'm burning down to break in

I'm a product of my roots

the world was birthed from sin…

6/1/19

-Gazi

This Time, Barefoot.

I’m dying again… haven’t you noticed?
Me, unfolding like a lotus.
Every cup I serve is filled with my blood
sweet on your tongue.
How nourishing, to forget what was,
yet still hold it
in the pockets of my heart.

I’ve got no change for you to take,
might hand you a capsule of my mind
a tensile force,
mirroring time,
whispering that there’s still some to waste.

Just like wind is to water,
my thoughts are to my feelings
shaping them, scattering them,
Ushering me along the way.

Feeling what I’ve thought,
thinking what I’ve felt,
looping like tide pulling shore,
hoping to rise
into new waves.

Isn’t that what this life is for?
To depart
from what once was core 
and find new reasons
to quiver my wings.

I flew off the hinges
just in time
to hear
the church bell sing.

1/3/2019

-Gazi