Empire, The City, (Fraught) Bodies: Poems from Apogee Journal

Through ten print issues and online, Apogee Journal has been engaging with questions of identity and intersectionality, centering the voices of marginalized writers and artists. As we’re currently transitioning to an all-online platform, these poems—from both print and online within the past year—represent where we’ve been; at the same time, they are also all of this moment, looking at the horrors of global empire, imperialism, and the violence that various bodies (including POC, queer, and trans folk) face. But they can also be witchy, funny, and new—overflowing with automatons, Frankensteinian creations, and “hog proximity,” among many other things.

Wild Peach

"w/ you in the slow hour" is a long poem intended to be read in its entirety in one sitting, as slowly as you are willing, allowing each word to swell in your mouth as the beat unfolds & deepens into itself. I've read excerpts in the past, but this poem has only been performed once in collaboration with Yulan Grant/SHYBOI at Triptych, the closing event of experiments in sound and poetry at Basilica Soundscape, curated by Shanekia McIntosh and Joey De Jesus.

A working principle in my photographic practice, "w/ you in the slow hour" also informs an effort in making myself porous to potent stillnesses & finding collaboration in all things, as collaboration is all things. & then where it all meets: cascading blur & the shadow's sharp edge revealing themselves through the flow of language(s, spoken & otherwise encountered), challenging image & text to work together w/out illustrating each other, but to insist on sensory expansion, to insist on life in all its transitory states.