a mother-daughter bond can tangle like a bird’s nest
knotted in instinct, spit, broken plastic,
scraps of care, and generations of unspoken grit.
mumma-bird builds it the only way she knows how:
delicate, fierce, desperate.
she weaves love with fear,
lines the base with silence mistaken for strength,
and packs the walls with survival disguised as tradition.
little red lady
the wind is rabid today.
not breezy or poetic, just aggressive.
a blunt force chewing through the shoreline,
ripping sunscreen lids from hands,
blasting sand into unzipped tote bags,
coating half-eaten fruit with the kind of grit that crunches in your teeth hours later.
this town is not theirs
this isn’t for those who fly in wearing pristine akubra hats and shame like a costume. the ones who eat off the fat of fear and call it community engagement. who talk and spit over their crumbed snapper about values they’ve never lived and bare-knuckled battles they’ve never had to fight. they’ll be gone before the wind shifts to a dangerous northerly, before the last prawn is peeled and exposed. their microphones and poorly ventilated vengeance, mistaken for victories, will stay hot long after their words go cold.
this is not for them.
Read Morebuilding on purpose
a writer’s purpose?
to serve the writer first.
before the noise.
before the forced polish,
before the sugarcoated captions that starve your truth.
nominated for surviving
today, on national trans day of visibility, i can’t help but feel like visibility has teeth. soft celebration doesn’t always sit right when you’re constantly fielding judgment dressed up as curiosity, or dodging the casual violence of being misunderstood. i’m non-binary, and that alone seems to stir a nerve in people—as if naming myself outside their idea of what’s real is a performance. when really, it’s them who are performing.
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