Is there a word for grieving

the destruction of an ecosystem

that has kept you breathing

that has stood for untold generations

of the ancestors you wish you got to know

It seems foolish to discuss nature w/o talking about endemic poverty which seems foolish to discuss w/o talking about corporations given human agency which seems foolish to discuss w/o talking about colonialism which seems foolish to discuss w/o talking about misogyny

the cure for my traumatic sexual dysfunction

is medicine that causes sexual dysfunction

and my rapist just became a father

as fascists burn the land i long for

the country i live in sends matches,

buys pipelines, subsidizes mines

that bow to bolsonaro and burn forests,

displace mountains, un-inter the land’s

soft-buried kin to mine for gold

what is it to care humanly without thinking that humans are the most important things in the picture?

there are brown kids in concentration camps

brown men in concentration camps

brown women who are forced to drink from toilets

since they aren’t given water in the concentration camps

and queers in concentration camps or killed

before they’re thrown in concentration camps

i don’t have children but the children

in the cages look like me and come from places

like my family is from, could be a million

distant cousins i can’t reach, will never meet

the wrong amazon is burning / and the wrong ICE is melting

it is 2019 there are rapists and nazis

it is 2019 there are rapists and nazis in office

it is 2019 there’s a rapist/nazi on campus

and the human rights office can’t help me,

it would contravene his rights

never again is now

hear it: never again is now

i don’t want children—how could I

when being human is not long for us

and when a brown face

is a sentence waged in melanin

white folks keep saying genocide

is too heavy a word

when they’re not burning with its weight

some of us cannot afford to theorize in splendid isolation while the death and devastation continue

i don’t want children

and my family is worried i will change my mind

when i grow old leaving no future generations,

but i'm worried that i won’t survive, myself

and once, I birthed a dead thing,

not a child, but a flesh and tooth omen

when my cousins choose to birth

new generations they do not

do so to feed children

to cages. our futurity

is not a crime futurity is not

a crime futurity is not a crime

my body is a series of refusals

I try to survive my sick body on Wolastoq land

and offer what i can to heal this river

and the people who protect her

offer what i cannot reach to give

the land my body comes from

while its rivers blaze with fire

once whiteness has destroyed my home

once amazonia has burned,

i have to live to nurse our ghosts