by nawa A.H.

nawa a.h., *blood map bracing,* a split, digital collage, in shared witness with an unsmogged sky, coral pieces, abalone, a sycamore trunk, a river bed, a native plant whose name I do not know yet and the San Gabriel Mountains, 4 x 6 inches, 2024. Courtesy of Moonyeka.

dear Coral Grief

nawa A.H. | OCT 2024 | Issue 38

dear Coral Grief,

if this letter finds you. it means you started growing on me because coral lives better in human bodies, in human spines, and are safer there than in salt water. i'm a tremor of a surrogate, with sudden shudders. did you hear me clearly? the ocean has lost its teeth.

we have no more mystery. the ground is all disco ball and everyone's ass is out. we are partying on graves. til the moon sets. we watch luna cry. with no water to pull, just acid rot. crabs forget how to molt. and, the sea shells are scooped up to help us learn how to address the housing crisis. now the Sea is houseless too.

we were all so touch starved. coral reef, i wouldn't wish touch for you. but it's too late. we all cared. especially those bodies of water that impaled themselves on dem bones dem bones of yours.

the lava syrups. it's the end of the world again. the sponges have dried back into old love. there are elders telling the kiddos to stop collecting the spinal cords. the kiddos do this every morning because they want a landline — someone to call back home, to pick them up, to answer their questions — i pick up. i tell em, it's time to grieve, it is enough.

make space for the newborn world, the one where kiddos with labor pains refuse to carry anymore droughts in their calcified hips.

by the way, rich tycoons collect our tears now. sell it back to us. the kiddos won't buy it — at first. eventually the kiddos become adult-kiddos who empty their pockets so they could pour back what's left of their original waters into an empty ocean; perhaps then they won't lose another mother.

if you would, stand a bit closer to me. til our spines collide. lay your tummies flat. smaller river next to smaller pond. the seventy-year-old is holding the seventeen-year-old, they'll take root together within a few years. first we will turn glassy, give a week. warn them to not step on us, or else, bone powder. from the center we are enveloped like a sunset and somehow we know we will bring the water back this way. coral, there is no apology for my grief. i only wish that we are here to watch you be born again. if not through my eyes, through the heart of a descendant, unafraid to wail

with only hope left,

nawa angel

nawa a.h., *Why must it be my coral grandchildren?* digital collage, coral, abalone, skin, land, 4 × 6 inches, 2024. Courtesy of Moonyeka.

Temple Street (2024)

KAPIT SA PATALIM — how could I grasp the blade now?
desperation carries
with the finest net to carry every living thing
with a spearhead poking squids into black puff’d clouds,
with wishes beachcombing future-hives
how do I shimmer louder?
with a home that betrays burns the heartline and
names you sacred-terrible, witch
here-now, this home becomes, beckons,
helps us.

There is nothing known left,
the stomping grounds stomp back,
soon, a 7:32AM earthquake welcome mat
I have come to believe that this return has never happened before
I had spit every drying blessing into the waterfall,
names you can never know floated.
my old belonging downs the river,
downs the remnants of my fish eater cheeks, my sibling’s tears gone jade, and
a mother’s repressed love.
Me here in the woven basket, mouth wrapped in the inabel blanket with names smited
in wish-fits of wonderfire.

What better question than:
What is it that wants you so much you don’t dare to want it back?
I do not want our microplastic children dying in desire.

Why must it be my coral grandchildren
or my lover’s smile
or my friends’ land taken,
or my water overwhelmed
that will see time collapse, or
sharpened into a perfectly shaped brow, or
suspended in a twenty minute club grind, a lover’s hand snagged in fishnets,
brown lips lined, sapped, bit! siphoned.
why has dancing become battling?
another thing un-free’d.

Somethings aren’t meant for reclaiming, no need for newness because for most
truth is ill like the air is,
presses lips together even though there’s timesick.
timesick to move faster than a hummingbird who flies down and up,
so still-fast. swirling past
a cherried future, either way
the lava wounds first, heals second
blacksalt likes to beg for more.
only the eyes of starflowers open now.

I am many unborn selves
whole, with a chance
to braid our seaweed esophagus and
grow mimosa and pick Valencia
oranges, still a moment
for a crushed smile.
I am bound to this river carriage — a dreamer
with no goodbyes —
to this city’s hot block held up! straight! up! embraced! by angel feathered Demonias
and Crazys baring halos, festering from sick-licked sun.
I submit to this Angeleno keyholder
a hard ass freshwater pearl
gatekeeping parasites.

I submit:
the jaded lips of love I could not hold,
the spring fever that won’t know no different than winter,
to this cityblockhouse who pushed out its own children for fear of them watching what happens when a construction crane demolishes the sun.
I submit my future to our future
in another fourth year of electoral distraction.
These babies in which I may not have the honor of having,
I submit them to the tenfold riddles,
a manic heat so hot that they’ll mark the way they risk on their own flesh land.
It will be their home then.
I submit their beams of unabashed devilishness — loving them like
the altar statue holding the snake that teeths the lotus.
I mouth off my love to the high crowned palm tree
to the pillow talk whispers in five a.m. nirvana
to be tried as the oyster tries parasite again,
to the choker pearl who had to
break ankles high hopping the moon;

Temple Street waits for them —
gets them back tracked, presses smog into their effort
— the way a city that never sleeps hopes a bouquet of blood-spilled dirt would never dream.

nawa a.h., *it will be their home then,* digital collage, in shared witness with an unsmogged sky, coral pieces, abalone, a sycamore tree, a river bed, and the San Gabriel Mountains.. 4 × 6 inches, 2024. Courtesy of Moonyeka.

Mamay Nawa, tell us another!

When you were born, you almost died, the nurses had a hard time getting me to push. Because I wanted to keep you. I wanted to keep being this close. I wasn’t quite ready to let you go. I was barely allowed to have you. That only lasted a minute because for the first time I did not need to sever at the waist. No one told me what I looked like when I was born, because the way I was born was through the devouring of another. So you are the first since the first. Since your greatest-greatest-great grandparent. You were born in between two eclipses. The Pisces Eclipse and the Libra eclipse, on October 2nd — the day before your grandmother's birthday. Three months too early.

You came out pale, small enough to fit two hands.

You were covered in all that moon slick. To be honest, I was hoping I wouldn’t pass down my birthmarks onto you: the way we can dislocate ourselves into hybrid halves, the faint feel of insatiability, for all the mouth memory of eating dying eggs from abandoned nests so those nests could see tomorrow with a suitcase of cash in hand. When I held you to my chest, I felt the two lil nubs in the middle of your shoulders. Chicken wings.

You came a bit early. By three months. It took you three more months than everyone else to be fully one year old! Three extra months to see you, to feed you. What a joy to choose you to devour me.

hello sweet lil blood map
I hope to know you
as long as you want
I will come to you bracing
a split in the sunset

nawa a.h., *blood map bracing, collage,* a split, in shared witness with an unsmogged sky, coral pieces, abalone, a sycamore trunk, a river bed, a native plant whose name I do not know yet and the San Gabriel Mountains, 4 x 6 inches, 2024. Courtesy of Moonyeka.

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. Recent publications include 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. They're currently a curated writer for KHÔRA.