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Skate, and: an accumulation of harms

2024; Indiana University Press; Volume: 135; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/tra.00021

0041-1191

Ashia Ajani,

Sport Psychology and Performance

Skate, and: an accumulation of harms Ashia Ajani (bio) Skate Silhouettes become me. I have no affinity for harsh lightingI prefer the way shadows distort time, how ocean wavesstretch bodies like duppies bowing out of this world and the next even when the moon hits blue-black just right salt slips from sleek backs, returns to a collective seawater;homeostasis. I wanted to dissolve into dark like that home in the mouth of Yemaya I glide over her tongue & tuck my bell bottoms so they don't get caughtin infinite wheels. A mermaid's tale— I became an animal transported by myth the first time at the roller rink felt like school, every gathering a chance tofeed ancient rhythms sunk to ocean floor Polished wood anointed with sweat, self-guided ablutions I recalled what it meant to be free & glisteningmore bend than bone More inlet than isolation, saddling the curved dark of purple bodies gliding to the sound of their own music,technologies of survival scattered across sand Dawn's light breaks our midnight shuffle like cops cutting through a crowd. Cartilaginous creatures wash up on shore,beaten by waves, they refuge in the tide pools of my chest I too find myself gasping for breath, for return This could be burial, a collapse of lungs deflating the egohaint blue of our veins warding off unwanted predators What God could ignore this? Your hands around my waist guiding migration to warmer watersWhere grief & gratitude burn at the far end of a backwood Let the open womb of the sea reclaim us Let us make portals out of gills [End Page 228] an accumulation of harms at the end of the world is an eviction notice. while dust gathered on the bumblebees' backs, Uncle Sam was getting rich pushing pesticides out his mean cavity, wide mouth swallowing even the simplest crumbs of concrete. though dendrites were sliced to stubs, roots wilted under poison's heat, memory sprung eternal. we knew the smoke warning and shelter in place abandonment signaled future firestorms to be withstood. we found we had more in common with the trash filled gully, the stray cat hunting mice in the alley; an invasive species outcompeting, an honorific worth suffering for. the disaster itself was, by all accounts, quite ordinary, yet immutable. the drag queens & banished Blacks warned us first of impending erasure, cops julienned our every resistance: sequined skin in the sink congested gluttonous drains in a kitchen of horrors, blackened lung & government apologies wore heavy on cheaply erected lies. self-deputized saviors sprayed RAID against an army of insurgents cuz we don't die, we multiply. in the wake of catastrophe, dread became dormant among all that white noise, colonizing sound, our rebellion hibernating under the sixth mass extinction, mother earth's open wounds stuffed with unexpressed passion as we lamented bearing witness to collapse in our prime. my friends bemoaned that all the poets are writing about the end of the world as if these quotidian lives aren't filled with small apocalypses, as if rejecting a disappearing act isn't its own riot. the observers wondered why we didn't leave, but where was there to go? this hell was home, scarred. we weathered waters before this flood. in America, toughness can easily be mistaken for tenderness, the meat of you pulverized either way. to say that we lived through it would be an understatement. ancestors were ahead of the game: their fugitivity reminding us that nothing is vestigial. capitalism and collapse, dirty water and dirty souls, cruelty unfurling, plain as another Wednesday afternoon. later, our televisions told us it wasn't a crime, it was a necessary evil, xenobiotic substances tested our able to endure toxicity, all that waiting rusted the edges of our youth: an unwelcomed baptism, a painful ablution. at the perforated border of this sacrifice zone, years later, a lone anthropologist pens: here was the site of an extermination. [End Page 229] Ashia Ajani Ashia Ajani is a sunshower, a glass bead, a carnivorous plant, an overripe nectarine hailing from Denver, CO, Queen City of the Plains and the unceded territory of the Cheyenne...