by nawa a.h.

Heidi Grace Acuña, *buwaya baby,* acrylic on canvas, 52 x 32 inches, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

to buwaya baby

nawa a.h. | SEPT 2024 | Issue 37

It is not usual for Buu to be clammy. Reptilian? Yes. Cool, wet, blood comes with being so close to a volcano’s tricuspid valve. Buu’s own heart tends to fuck shit up. She’s too hot to touch, but devastatingly entrancing, like a candle pooling wax towards the center flame. Part of you wants to touch it, to cast two fingerprints in a goop’d surrender, even if it means risking getting singed in the end.

A butterfly lands under the salt wet of Buu’s eyes. Buu calls it eye sweat. She doesn’t bother to wipe them away. There’s a client on the other side of the vintage rotary phone landline; he isn’t afraid of missing her. Buu misses something too, longing spills over in a misplaced way.

Don’t you miss me, Mami?

OVER THE PHONE BUU BECOMES —

She replies covering her own loneliness, a dangerous state if ever caught by a voyeur — too much relatability is a liability. Buu’s breath creates condensation on the phone receiver. It dribbles down the spiraling phone chord. Her finger spirals her hair, where her brain spirals hard enough to change the shape of her sulcus. The grooves furrow. The eye brow furrows. The heart burrows. It’s a dollar for every sixty seconds that passes and Typhoon Gaemi is fifteen minutes away. Risqué is foolish, but it pays the bills. Dead or alive. Buu oscillates between the two; her tongue rolls in and out like a party kazoo.

Tell me what you look like.

The rain hits the glass like a backhand. Buu puts the receiver up to the window. The raindrops are metal heavy, slighted, cutting the air, falling so fast, a pussy-whipped missile; as if she’s hitting herself quick enough to sting.

You’re doing all that for me?

Buu unlocks her jaw over the phone receiver and places the bottom of the phone receiver near her ganglia. Her hot breath is silent. Her teeth meet each other; in the middle two human eyes, yours. SNAP!

actually, no.

— A CROCODILE

Heidi Grace Acuña, *buwaya baby (detail 1),* acrylic on canvas, 52 x 32 inches, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

(Q: Why do crocodiles have the right to live?)

(A: No reason)

Record Type: archive letter #72
Creator: unfound, gone, dead
Creation Date: post eruption 2030, pre-Mars gentrification
Medium: ink on crocodile leather
Curator note: leather thinned, broken in the middle, signature is a symbol of a volcano, no name found

Dear Buwaya baby,

Even a land can be jealous. Even a volcano can get sick of its own disruptions. It’s easy to find the fault lines. Pointed blame is just that. I’d never blame you, buwaya. The land rips open so that the ocean fish can get slick along the fissure. That atlas moth was employed to cover it up — a scapegoat with wings.

You’re not here yet. Actually, I’m told you don’t exist. Which isn’t to say you’re dead. Yes, it is strange that we no longer get to have death. So, when another buwaya offers a webbed pinky toe, choose the reprieve. No need for all this hesitation when you are the caution.

You gotta get skin-thick. Think a swamped lugaw. Tougher than a coconut husk, all that pulpy pink juice precipitates shame. I won’t never let you see, but below the waist, I fuck shame til it's fermented. Try it sometime.

Rebellion is sopping wet. The atlas moth, soaked, still flies. I wonder where those moths are who can defy weather. Maybe it’s us, misplaced in a gray cold place. There's only so many places where we can trade flying for being weighed down by the fog. Somehow we convince our bloom that this is it.

It isn’t.

You should forgive yourself for self-abandoning for gods who demand nothing but demand. The only thing naked is the rain. What a flirt, some will say, this is a taunt. The real taunt is that you’re doing it better even though you should just be doing less. Teka muna. Remember what fate tastes like. If you forget, take the guava seed, grind it to a gum, and blow that bubble til it busts.

It’s your turn to be Buwaya, baby. Feed them back misplaced fears — tell them what your name makes of you. That flavor of newfound guilt will tick. The steadfast panic, the giantess’ heart racing. Like bakunawa deepthroating the moon again. It’s okay, you can swallow

With my heart erupted,

Heidi Grace Acuña, *buwaya baby (detail 2),* acrylic on canvas, 52 x 32 inches, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

Cleu, a fitted, clean-cut boy born and raised in Echo Park stumbles across Heidi Grace Acuña’s retrospective exhibit in the LA Times. HGA is most known for her work as a pop star, with four albums and several fashion lines. Most people looked over her earlier forms of experiments in visual art and sculpture. Some academia heads got a six-digit fellowship to do some deep research and found some lost work post the 2032 volcanic eruption on Duwamish land. The painting, buwaya baby, is the center of this exhibit, at a gallery in the middle of the last water preserve.

Cleu is nearing the end of his misgendered life. He is ravenously steeped in his desire. Euphoria has damned his veins with vascularity. He’s big-hard. Everywhere a mix of devil shudders and wilted bliss. His heart gapes open for something new, like emotional attraction (?!) He freezes. Just a year ago, sex and feelings spattered like moon oil and ACV.

Could anyone be available for his monthly ecdysis? His repressed eroticism plods towards an over qualified at all things Venusian, phone sex operator named Buu. Buu’s voice is one part orange glow and two parts forest fire. Cleu has been squeamish. But his nervousness is overridden with his newfound starcrossed suave — he asked her on a date to this exact exhibit over voice memo.

Heidi Grace Acuña, *buwaya baby (detail 3),* acrylic on canvas, 52 x 32 inches, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

Buu arrives to the date in a sadistic silence. Her vocal chords make Cleu’s fast-growing genitals shift in their pants. She wears something terrible to touch, a safety measure. A green corduroy dress, frayed at the edges with a rough organza. Her skin is as powdered as a moth, dusting her presence all over his starch white Uniqlo button up. HUDA Beauty in Olive Pit. He wants to move along the entire length of Buu’s torso. He wants to be mangled.

Can I give you a compliment? Cleu gleams, steady in his attitude. Buu smirks before consenting.

I like the thing your eyes do, when the night sets. They shimmer.

Oh, they don’t usually do that, except they totally do. Buu eyeshines when she is extra shy or in the dark. She stims with the black veil from her pillbox hat to cope with the newfound delight and discomfort of receiving sweetness. She pushes the veil away from her face. The motion reveals short hair slicked back, hairline gel’d into oooo’s and q’s and ggggodddamns.

Cleu offers his arm for Buu to hold onto, Buu awkwardly loops through it with the aloofness of a middle schooler with her “best friend.”

I thought you’d be into this work. It’s from a newly found archive, about 75 years old, and they've done a lotof restoration onit.
Iguess

Acuña madeit
withacrylic,

butit’snot quitethoriginal. Iheardthey repainted it ona newcanvas, sountilthen,it’s kindofa hologram. But wegetto seeitin theprocess. Doyouwant to seetheoriginal? Theytriedtopreserveit asmuchaspossible, butthe volcanoheart isburnedthrough from environmentaldamage, and thewingsoftheatlasmotharechewedup fromthe

invasivemothinfestation in2050
Cleu spews like a geyser, he fits a sleepless night of research in the span of two minutes. They walk through the remnants of the original painting. Some rooms showcase holograms with motion-activated voice overs.

Buu’s eyes are misty, checked out. The buwaya in the preserved original barely exists. Letters, interviews with the artist, reviews, songs, sketches litter the exhibit in an attempt to center, contextualize, and prove the existence of the original 52” x 32” acrylic on canvas buwaya baby painting. Buu looks at the pieces of chewed up canvas that leave behind a brown figure, a giantess perhaps—it reminds Buu of their mother islands. The archipelago hid under the last of the coral reefs and never re-emerged after a series of back to back typhoons. A recent National Geographic study professed that there have been as many typhoons as there have been newborns.

Heidi Grace Acuña, *buwaya baby (detail 4),* acrylic on canvas, 52 x 32 inches, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

Sensing Buu’s sullen demeanor, Cleu guides Buu towards the gallery’s attempt at Acuña’s restored painting.

It feels impossibly hopeful.

Looming larger than all those typhoons combined, the installation covers two giant walls with projected light, texturized by a mist of steamed water. Acuña evokes Buu to see blue for what feels like the first time. Buu chokes up. buwaya baby swallows her grief the same way The Moon Eater, Bakunawa does every eclipse. For a moment, Buu transforms into the lump in her throat; she takes a breath before considering the archipelago of polished loss that gate keeps her from herself. Her breath opens a door to a home, inside a volcanic heart. Who would live with Buu there? Knock knock.

Cleu’s there. With a handful of Acuña’s painted orchids, they’d make do to cover all that so-called evil in Buu’s eyes. A tear drops. A butterfly lands on Buu’s erupting eyeduct. Cleu swats the incoming butterflies away who are too ready to street sweep any of that crocodile water. The butterflies disappear.

Hey, you ok? Cleu knows she isn’t.

Buu doesn’t reply. Her eyes squint hard. She tries hard to piece together the painting from 80 years ago, before it got all chewed up. It’s difficult to imagine in a white walled place. It’s Old in a bad way — archaic, with the marble imitating sterile alabaster.

Buu realizes that this exhibit is made for being-things who forgot she could be alive enough to see herself in a pool of cracked acrylic. Buu is treated like an endangered species by the art handlers, museum staff. Passerbys stare at her, wondering if they can forget her or if they should put on their savior suits.

I'm sorry I'm sinking…I mean, I haven’t let myself be so close to water in awhile. Does it feel like a swamp in ‘ere to ya? Buu fans herself trying to seem poised and put together, even with her eye sweat arriving, unannounced. The lotus flower doesn't need to be a lily pad and Buu doesn’t like feeling The Feels™, but here she is. Cleu tries not to notice.

It’s rare to see something we might not get to have anymore, Cleu says. His eyes consider Buu the same way he considers the painting. Your grief is a gift, everyone’s is. Cleu says. He takes in Buu through his peripheries. She asked him to ignore the obvious lineage of violent extinction she comes with. Buu calls it baggage.

He tries to do what she says, push away her truths, ones buried in the pineal gland of the collective consciousness. But doesn’t this make him an executioner? He wants to know her, but the connection feels capsized. Buu arrived on the land with a slandered headline: RARE CROCODILE INJURES 15 AT ECHO PARK LAKE UPON ARRIVAL.

Eyeshines
longer than a rice field,
a tonguing river
splits carcasses of five
dogs one goat
Resident reports another attack by crocodiles

Cleu tries to brush off the propaganda but his intrusive thoughts ping like a digital stalker in the DMs: how did she survive? I wonder if she’d ever want to kiss? Is she truly the last crocodile? Did she kill the rest of them? Would she kill me? I don’t care. That death would be worth it.

Buu pauses, trying to gaze through the eyes of the crocodile in the painting; the mimic’d eye of the butterfly. I want someone to hold me the same way that the crocodile is protecting the brown figure’s grief… the last time I felt that way was laying in some mud, she laughs for the first time, it’s so sudden and booming that other patrons side eye her. Cleu’s glass heart melts, he imagines holding Buu’s jaw and wiping away the incoming weep of Buu’s own impending typhoon. Crocodile tears, the world calls it. He prepares his hands to swat away the butterflies, who act more like persistent horseflies and invasive locusts.

Can I…would it be helpful or nice to hold hands? Cleu offers his hand and Buu retracts. She tries to hide herself and Cleu from the sight of her own scaly c-curved fingers.

Wait! Bring those here. I wanna see your nails. Is that gold foil?

Buu glares, uncomfortable with the attention, I don’t need you to make me feel better about myself. The fault line of San Andreas is a boundary that slips the same way Buu gets out of gold label vintage lingerie, and once slipped out, strikes. Echo Park will never fall into the ocean, so they say. Cleu learns quick that he needs to be better at reading Buu’s moods. He becomes the weatherman of the moment. For the sake of his own life.

I didn’t mean to…erm…Cleu fumbles.

Which one are you? Buu asks, redirecting back to the painting. She feels a boatload of shame for snapping her teeth a little too quickly. Great, he probably thinks a natural disaster is coming. In perfect anxiety turns into manifestation, the ground shimmies just ever so slightly. Buu hopes he doesn’t notice. She smiles with all sixty-eight of her teeth. Cleu can’t tell if he’s in danger or if he’s attracted to beings that scare him.

I don’t think I’m any of ‘em, I just like that the butterflies don't fear the crocodile. Wutta’ bout you? Says Cleu.

Soooo you’re a butterfly? Buu teases. I’m this part, Buu motions to the part of the painting that has a crocodile with a butterfly, on its nose, veiling the occipital area of the naked figure.

You mean the way the butterfly and the crocodile make a mask?

No, I am the thing behind it.

nawa a.h. (widely known as Moonyeka) is a chimeric creator working across containers of performance, qt nightlife, digital art, experimental media and the divine. They're a settler fluttering between Chumash, Chinook, and Duwamish lands. Within their mixed-diasporic-bakla embodiment, Moonyeka creates experiences of queer erotic joy, animism, Ilocano imagination, and beyond. Their collaborative processes center kapwa, maarte, and kilig as a compass to imagine thriving worlds for their communities.

i was never the siren (2024) is a film re-myth of the Siren archetype; the first installment of their multimedia project 'Harana for the Aswang' realized with House of Kilig collaborators.

nawa draws upon queer and trans performance technologies in their writing, infusing nightlife, states of con-myth-legend, drag, tease, and kink. You can find them frolicking in a spectrum of writing fields such as biomythography, hybrid-wtfness, and the game writing industry. They were recently published with their multiverse of work centering Waling-Waling Orchids in smoke and mold. am i hot enough to kill?, an excerpt of (w)horrific hybrid prose, is featured in The Holy Hour anthology by Working Girls Press.

Heidi Grace Acuña (HGA/they/she) is an artist who “creates to live” for their mental health, for their communities, and to honor their ancestral calling. Born in Federal Way, Washington to immigrant Ilokano-Filipino parents, and raised on O‘ahu since one year old, Heidi felt disconnected to a true sense of home and belonging. Now, Heidi makes art that finds the beauty in the multiplicities, imperfections, and expansiveness of identity, culture, gender, and home. Heidi’s dimensional work in ceramic sculpture, textiles, painting, illustration, printmaking, and photography reveal anxiously curious, and deep investigations of universal human experiences, which are inspired by the diverse tropical colors of her island homes, living in diaspora, and the need for connection.