This Litany is an Elegy for the Phoenix’s Friend
by nawa Angel A.H.
nawa angel 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.
This Litany is an Elegy
for the Phoenix’s Friend
nawa ANGEL A.H. | NOV 2024 | Issue 39
Blanket me
Slow down. my lover, my friends, my sibling, my neighboring lime tree says to me. They say it quickly, like a campfire catching too much wind. They say it with the heat of their own survival stinging. Skin seared. Heart broken through. Slow need to come quicker. Quicker likes to catcall me. Slow needs to cruise me all eyes, no mouth. Quicker frisks and wears me.
Slow down, mama! No need to rush.
Where you goin’ Handsome?
Walkin’ that fast lookin’ that fine?
The first thing to equip the slow down is a blanket. My blanket was stolen, some say I lost it. It is strange to recall a blanket that is lost in the layers of how I could’ve possibly let it go missing. It can be hard to imagine what we should wrap ourselves up in when the only thing left to weave stays silent.
My Lola was the barangay seamstress. She gave me an inabel baby blanket sized for an adult, so I can grow into it. My dead name inscribed, setting the tone for cousins who don my dead name with aliveness or neutrality. My blanket came with matching pillow cases. I’ve never laid on them. They’re wrapped in tissue paper. A relic. If I told you what the motifs meant, I’d be giving you way to my dreams. My dreams are the most precious spaces. Some of them are just for me.
don’t go to bed angry.
tangle your feet into jade vines.
forefinger the ocean inside you.
finally weep.
It’s probably toxic that I require orgasms for closure. It’s probably messed up that I require this fight to find each other, like St. Therese praying by grinding their orgasms onto a cliff edge.
touch your throat til there’s spillage,
hairgrab til there’s jaw drop.
angry dream of immaculate conception.
How many midnight love fests has it been? What I mean is, have you met yourself in another and, are you done yet with being the mirror. trust me, you are more ocean than that! Being the mirror is bad luck.
pillow talk every sword pointed at your tongue
stain the sheets on purpose,
bleed free.
My hands are too tired to touch the fabric. I inherited fatigue from my Lola who can no longer sew the town bride into her wedding dress. Too tired to assess the holes. To construct a wearable future.
Go nai nai,
caress the wounded dreams,
attend the dream funeral.
sleep a week, if that's truly-truly what you want.
Descendents sew rice terraces in a google drive, a cloud, AI cannot remember the names of everyone and everything in my cells. They unweave me from a digital binary cloud, falling through a cumulus of made-up images, tearing apart photo album archives, guessing inside iPhone storage back ups, device storage too full. They find Lola’s frayed dream frantically scribed in google keep note.
give up your eyes to the kalabaw
who sleeps to find you
a dream walks behind you to tell you to kiss your lover before they leave.
I loom it all together. I can take a dragonflies’ technicolor eye through any digital security held up by my subconscious. I design the dizzy. Evil warded. I’ll even invite a lover underneath it. Perhaps this inabel will tell on me. Will reveal how long I have dreamt of them.
Que sueño con angelitos
deities dream upside down in a back arch,
echolocating our exit plan: eachother.
Are you attached enough to experience something like anticipatory grief? The shoe doesn’t drop, it disappears. Babies dream of the elders who outlive them. Elders dream of their arms filled, cradling to sleep the next empire betrayer.
Fruit bats tuck angels in the arms of tarsier monkeys,
who wait til you sleep like a baby.
I caught my neighbor eavesdropping on my bed rituals. Tracking my lover’s missteps. Before I knew it, my dreams got invaded. Skewered.
a dream kisses you back and tells you to
play with yourself til the evil is gone.
+
I confess this compassion:
I am not above hating you.
if you think my freedom a threat,
if you kill the scapegoat
because it is more alive than you.
+
It is two days after Election Day. My lover says, why when the world is ending are we ending too? Why are we not coming closer to each other? I apologize, and unstick my tongue bulls eye’d on Duterte’s dart board. My tongue bleeds while I talk. My beloved also apologizes, and untangles their hope from the grasp of 74,648,247 votes wearing the same faceless, chum expressions. Each pro-tyrant ballot shakes my lover’s heart like a rattle.
Today, we are in the wake of the same circumstances, the same old world we know, and this attempt at immortality is worse. By the way, I am ageist. And this age of empire will never be as sacred as an elder.
This immortality, pitiful.
Today, I am betraying myself with purpose. I betray the uninvited religion that grew in my mother’s uterine walls. I betray the fascism smize that fancied my lover’s grand smile and uses it for capital gain. I am betraying the hijacked nervous system. My betrayal is a water dragon who is slick bodied, who is sick with revenge fantasies of cock and ball torture. But even that is so generous. It is likely a fetish of my fantasy receiver. For those so power hungry, a fetish means something that turns you on that you also fear, that you also hate. But this is not a fetish. You cannot fetishize people.
Bakunawa sits fetishized at the base of my spite. Bakunawa renews with a phoenix-eye-view. Moves with a love that is terrorized, a love that is proclaimed as repulsive. And so it is. My love is revolting. My love is a kill shot.
Today, my lover asks for a hug. My lover who inherited a drowning budget in another dictator made complex, non-profit. Gives his whole team a mental health stipend, making sure phone operators get the most, and higher ups, the least, or nothing at all. Asks me if this is enough. My lover who cannot tell I am already smothered by the insult of despair. My lover who cannot tell I am fearing the singe closeness leaves. I am afraid that it means I will need to be engulfed in a love that destroys a world where I must fight. I wasn’t ready to renew as ash this soon. THIS. AGAIN! I respond to my lover, I don’t know, it is unlike anything I have ever known. That kindness. That care. I wanted to say, it is enough that we are alive, or at least undead.
+
Have you ever seen someone step to a Phoenix?
The Phoenix steps out of the way.
Out of courtesy of wanting you to stay alive.
+
I don’t need a president. I need my lover, who strategizes care for everyone, to be cared for. Care cremates. My lover is the fire, urgent to keep me warm. Quick to ensure my ember. Steady swallows star deaths after a day of holding everyone else but themselves. I am still not used to this love, even so far into these days that are years. The days that pile up like centuries. My lover, this community daddy, is a fast learner. He says it's enough to do nothing but grieve. He says this, and I overhear our own community demanding a singular answer no one can speak to. He says this, demanded to move faster. Extracted away from his own grief.
My beloveds and I are facing our differences in our crisis response. The distortions in our grief are made of 50 stars. It is made of 13 stripes. I take a lighter to my altar. Light another candle. And let the flags waving freely on my skin burn.
I betray the mirror, but it does not change that I am turned phoenix again.
My lover on Election Day is interviewed again to talk about trans something or other. It’ll be a good headline. Headlines do not offer protection. Actually, they do the opposite. There is a death threat in my lover’s inbox. But this is not anything particularly new, it is just more. My lover on Election Day is asked for a statement, a stance, some words, it is urgent, immediate. There cannot be a moment of silence. My lover on Election Day is asked to join a movement he already is apart of. Then, a phonecall from his own panic. Sox News finds a piqued interest in trans rights. My lover is talking to the health secretary of state because the state got found out about the non-consensual calls to cops when someone is calling regarding their mental health crisis. There are billboards everywhere telling everyone to use their brand-new national mental health support hotline 988. Nationally funded by your tax dollars, are more people nonconsensually being sent to psych wards, crazy houses, side-stepped prison places. The Lifeline report says, 988 is 911. The secretary of state is asking for free advice after saying the report will cause more deaths because now less people will call their 988 to 911 pipeline. The government is asking for free advice. A whole star system grieves in my lover's arms on a zoom screen on a phone call hours away from each other. There are fifty made up borders in my house and everyone has a trigger finger cocked at the wrong mirror. On Election Day my lover's phoenix is assassinated.
+
I plucked three orange hibiscus.
four pairs of hands pluck from an armful of marigolds.
in every corner, windowsill, stair step are phoenixes training hope.
+
300% of calls at The Lifeline have increased. Most of them hate calls. Most of them pranks.
Pranks are burying my friends.
The phoenixes are burnt out —
ring ring
I’m sorry. The phoenix is unavailable and cannot pick up the phone right now.
Please call 1 800 ASH-ASH5 if this is urgent or an emergency.
ring ring.
I’m sorry. This line no longer exists. Please hang up and try again.
ring ring.
You have reached the Office of Ash & Culture. If you have any leads on procuring ash, or have the known whereabouts of Phoenix’s we will buy, cash in hand, or if preferred a no limits spending Amazon gift card. Thank you for choosing fascism!
— are crying with precision,
wetting the ash with the gruel of predictable outcome.
+
Have you seen a Phoenix quiver?
It rises out of pride & error,
the star spangled banner vomits out of a fired up esophagus.
+
It melts the stars to slime them across a dictator's face and that’s just in real life because in dreams a phoenix plucks the gun metal from all the Land and all the appropriated, mis-use of gold stars as award medals of every sergeant, lieutenant, and state official, and inhales them. The phoenix opens its beak and spits all the spite back into the middle of the earth, wetting its fire feathers in an ocean. The phoenix dives sharp like a hawk catching another dictator misusing another bird symbol for freedom.
The phoenix emerges to form a ring of fire around every birthing person, around every transcendent gender, around the most soot-loving of us. Gives all them pluto eyes. A carrion mouth.
when you rebirth,
death will know peace.
we will need to learn to be vultures together
for vultures will always remember to scavenge the ashes
we will alter our own fire wings to resemble a void,
blanket yourself with fury.
we must defy,
with tears armed,
so we can love on each others’ vicious
nasty and full.
This Litany is an Elegy for the Phoenix’s Friend
We who do not need to exile each other
for exile sits on our roofs donning masks of our friends
We who do not need to escape each other
cuz we have already escaped.
We who do not fear each others sick,
Together in first abandonments,
now self-abandonments all together bubbling in swamps —
us re-spawned, us undeniable feelings atop all these notions of irresistible worlds
we who might be twiddling the finest silk thread of the finest woven unreality.
We who press our faces too close the disco mirrors,
for days we are not all here,
in the clubs, promising each other dances.
We who try to remember the songs
on nights we are overly touched,
where then the dances excuse themselves.
There are so many tomorrows
Tomorrows like, chest smiles,
Yesterdays surefire, yesterdays melted sick.
I am sorry for all of us who desire to be this alone.
Sorry for those of us who forget the
todays that break open
todays who fondue in possibilities and
uncooked birthday keyk.
Pasensya ako, to those of us who dare blame the ashes.
We who congregate like geese, who are swans turned
red, oil’d ducks and tar stuck water birds choosing
fire anyways, maybe for the fun, maybe cuz we’re
endangered in the smogged sun. Dozens of us are
molting, singed in a purple blaze.
We who are away watching you be a way again.
We who fly to honor your distance that lives on top of a glass building.
Lives behind a glass screen.
Flying, you, but on another plane to your motherland.
Congratulations, you’ve escaped,
us,
here,
decades away from feeling the condensed air,
centuries away from a milked kiss and the soft cheeked water of our mother,
lands.
So many of us
here,
on lands not ours, choking or embracing
us,
inside cities,
tending the camps,
loving on water falls,
caught in between the raving night
caught protecting reprieve.
But you, friend, you’ve escaped!
With a bundle of time, a bundle of me, myself i, flying so high and
what a time to forge knife words, cutting your own people into cubed deities. after
bronzing your beloveds so tall —
us childs with tantrum hands grabbing back
collecting all the escaped nothing.
We who ember, blamed, for wildfires
made by people who
heat the Land and expect
the red-eye swans to hold in
Gusts; the vultures to be silent in their eating
of too many dead; for the hawk to not dive into the river, to catch nothing —
for everything has flown away,
escaped a new world, a wrong world.
The Phoenix is a Vulture disowned, together, an unfound elegy
Wherever you are,
I hope you are sorry
and that you’re okay.
nawa angel 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.