Sanctuary in the Shadows

When the cicadas crawl their way out of the underground, it’s to wail and fuck. I imagine the mutated faggot cicadas that are getting infected with parasites that turn them gay, burrowing in the darkness, creating tunnel systems upward in hopes of reaching the other side. I understand why they scream for so long after. I wonder if any of the cicadas decided to stay underground and continue to build little systems of survival, with other deviants who found the underground to be their home. I wonder if they resemble the networks my friends and I have created. Axolotls and salamanders can regenerate body parts when chopped off, and machine parts can be repurposed into instruments, bondageware, and technological trash sculptures. Hope is my pet; I carry it within my chains, leashes, and tightly around my neck. I hold onto that feral, untamed thing with fists clenched and drag it along through the shit-covered streets. Hope never looked beautiful; the most beautiful things I’ve witnessed are blanketed in suffering and agony. Hope is killing my old self and regurgitating out of the dying skin even stronger and with new upgrades. My alarm clock feels like waking up with a knife in my hand sometimes.

I have to twist the knife inside myself to remind my heart that the pain should be felt. I roll out of my skull sheets and put on my broken platform boots. I go out to the backyard to smoke a cigarette and look up at the carousel horse sculpture and around at the shitty tags on the walls and leftover beer cans on the floor from the grindcore show the night before. I look at my bitten-down nails and heavily tattooed arms and run my hand through my uneven bihawk. I dig the hilt in deeper and remember why I am alive. I text my friend reminders why she shouldn’t kill herself. I try to reassure my other friend that he will get a job soon. I roll my eyes upon receiving another stupid transphobic message on my whore phone. A trick once again ask what genitals I have. The million-dollar question! Being trans means walking on shattered glass and trying to avoid getting cut while also being pelted with falling shards. I think about when my long-term ex washed a piece of glass out of my foot. The shard had been stuck there for days. We still haven’t figured out what to do with these wounds, but at least we learn how to tend to them. All the people I love are fags, whores, sex workers, artists, freaks, outcasts, mutants, punks, and mentally ill. I have almost lost so many friends over these past few years, and I hold the ones I did lose close still. I touch the alien spore tattoo next to my heart so close and remember my friend Yoko, a noise tattoo total artist freak, whose life was taken by a hit-and-run in New Orleans.

The world at this point is almost uninhabitable for us. We are being faced with so much constant, unending violence that the only response to such depraved conditions is to go into states of numbness and disillusionment. We live with constant negotiations and a choice that feels like what I imagine getting branded with a hot iron and pressing into a freshly scraped-open wound. However, the only way out of the void is by scraping and crawling to feel. I believe that the relationships we build with one another and the small acts of resistance are the only way to continue surviving through the death machine. I believe economies were created outside the state and, we must use that foundation to keep each other alive and under the radar. Doing HRT skill shares with friends on how to get on hormones medically, pooling EBT together, or caravanning way too many people deep everywhere. Living in communal spaces like punk houses or communes with other loving weirdos who are attempting to live lives in retaliation to these bigger powers. Sharing skills like woodworking, construction, bike repair, car maintenance, and even trading art techniques. We can change the course of each other’s lives by skill sharing because we are creating autonomous systems outside of institutions. I became a tattoo artist because my friends showed me how to use a tattoo gun and talked me through the process.

I don’t know if I believe I will see the fall of all these systems in my loved ones and community and hosting fundraisers and other forms of tangible support for those in crisis and for bigger social causes. A way that I have found successful and combines many things that I am deeply passionate about is hosting fundraisers. I started hosting DIY shows and fundraisers when I was 18, and I have continued to host and play fundraiser and mutual aid benefit shows since. One of my first shows was at a space I lived at when I was 20, and it was for two of my trans friends who were facing eviction and were unable to meet their basic needs. I continued hosting DIY show fundraisers until I started my band and began playing benefits and fundraisers too. Through that project, I hosted fundraisers for Kashmir and Mindanao, which would turn into day-long festivals with 7+ acts, vendors, and teach-ins. At these fundraisers, we had teach-ins on Palestine, Native-led land back movements, Stop Cop Campus and Stop Cop City, and Star Route Farm. On average, we raised around $2,000 from each event, just from people attending and supporting the vendors. In the past, I have hosted benefits for friends, loved ones, and community members in crisis who have been able to get needed funds to people in urgent situations. I remember hosting “Makibaki for Azaadi,” one of the first Kashmir and Mindanao fundraisers my bandmate and I hosted at the Church of Fun in Los Angeles in 2019. This event included 13 musicians and over 12 vendors.

These small victories, these acts of rebellion and community building, may feel like only fleeting moments in the grand scheme, but they are our resistance. Each fundraiser, each gathering, is a tiny crack in the machine—a space where something else, something freer, can grow. I know we may not dismantle the whole system in a single lifetime. But maybe that’s not the point. I’ve laughed at fate. I will always be a menace. The wretched, scorned, ruined, unwanted, despised, hated, feared, ungodly, scum, and filth will win. I am a firm believer that Armageddon will wash away what the Earth does not need anymore, and the mutants will rise from the underground. In the meantime, we are making our labyrinths and sanctuaries—unruly places where no one can control or police us. I believe as the wreckage continues to burn, we will wipe the ashes off our faces, tighten our boots, and use our suffering as a weapon to fight back harder. No one can ever truly kill a freak; we live in forgotten alleyways, scrap yards, and highway underpasses. Every freak that has passed has an altar in someone’s punk house. I believe that our dead will light the way forward, and we will continue to find salvation and build new, fucked-up roads for the baby freaks behind us. The people I lost still visit me and let me know that I must keep their stories alive. I trust this path I am paving. I will trip over barbed wire and use my sword to cut through the poisonous vines to make a clearing. This path is not pretty, and you gotta have thick skin to avoid toxins, but we will make it across. It is my only dream. I will continue to sharpen my blade.

‍