Tentacular Anarchist Poetics
the stench of seaweed
sharp in the fingertips / happiness
tastes like seasalt
on your skin
with this downpour of light shaping itself
into forehead kisses
I’m dreaming of
me in my dyke boots tending to
guerrilla gardens,
us molding the last bits of clay
on our communal houses, the solar powered
cyborgs reading poems in our glasshouse-turned-library
and the nomadic beekeepers mapping the world
in wildflower honey
we are
futuring the queer temple
with our toes digging trails of aliveness
an archive of dance vocabularies
made in underground raves, in the panic post anti-trans laws
our deities are worms alchemizing compost –
when there is nothing left
we will always be able
to whisper prayers to the mud.
time is an erotic landscape
intertidal
unfurling our skins
and birthing new tongues to speak right at this moment
never finishing anything endlessly
edging this planet in their turn
this is the miraculous strangeness of the world
come and taste it
rub your fingers into the unknown textures
of this joyous mess
from my skin to yours to the breath
of the trees
your feet mulching on soil; it’s rust.
shining in sunlight/an orb-weaving spider
spinning threads made with your blood made
with your sharpest hunger
heavy
in the luminescent skylight
decentralised cities
from the dance floor to the protest
speculative adorations –
world building from our bellies touching
undoing that ancestral pain
chanting from the nucleus of my cells
when there is nothing left
we will always be able
to trust in our day dreams
invoking social ecologies and
stories with big mouths chewing on this
asymmetric present
and on all of our city’s
anti-homeless
architecture
All That Wet Green Genesis
bury my wet skeleton underneath your tongue
in the warmth of your body
I will be reborn
a manifesto drenched in aphrodisiac –
we build new organs
with these glimmering breaths
& see how mist turns into flesh
when longing is a playground. I crown you
in seashells I gathered
so my mind can remember
my identity is not far
from the luminous vastness of water.
seems appropriate – I turn
into a barnacle
glue myself to your bliss. feed me with the salt of your tears
I can survive both in the body of a sea
and on its migratory ghosts.
I can survive on any membrane
welcoming enough to not forget my name
and that my name is touch
and that my name is time.
I crown you with these seashells
till your tongue can only speak
in whale songs
and you lullaby me into the night
while the waves kneel this time
not at the moon
but at your shine.
algae spread throughout your tailbone
mingling with the prehistoric data
a polyphonic remembrance –
your skins turning inwards into mossbeds
DNA archives of tails scales and bone caressed
by the deep sea. all that wet green
Genesis –
the elemental gods rushing into overspill
shapeshifting
into longing, teeth, tongue, pulse and trouble.
The Erogenous Zones of Memory
It’s december and my longing
Asks for snow.
An offering from the skies
That only tease us
With their mothering. I wait
& hope to be tangled
In the mismatched colors
Of the sun – this time carved
From an eye’s
White
Shell.
I love us with terror. I don’t go lightly
Towards the seraphim
Made from your blood. Their claw
Posing as a wing
Arched,
To nest me whole.
I don’t go lightly
Towards the seraphim
Made from your blood.
I would just ask-
Transcribe me in sound
As I know sound is your breath
Birthed into refuge – in the bridge between
You & awe.
Let your cello sing of my pulse
Spreading through your fingertips spreading
through sun-kissed soil
Your head in my hands,
Radiant animacy –
Fractals of flesh & its bruises
Cradling moss –
The earth’s humming
Licks our bones clean
Spits us back out.
A salivating prayer pierced in all corners
By the chlorophyll
You left dripping.
Our mouths full of mud
Saying yes
To a longstanding wailing.
Do you still remember
What you were carrying underneath your eyelids?
Me neither,
But I can feel the sea, so close.
The shape of what is to come
Trembles
And we tear up to know
The future has a heartbeat. Come here
You say
As my skin makes itself into a bridge towards yours
What is love than just divinity
Teasing. What is love than just
A shelter of spit- a river so dense
it clings to your bones.
This is how snow feels when you call onto it, you say
When you swap a breath
For a kiss? I ask
Hearing you reminds me of smearing my blood across the bark of that tree who raised me in the dream worlds. Feels like something else outside of us weaves our breaths together like braids. I sing to this blood my longing & the roots of the tree become the bearers of my most hidden self. The most unwelcoming, the one that fortifies itself by hunting future memories- the beasts that bite from underneath the feet gulping in the shadows that hope makes when it’s so ripe it’s rotten.
I let this blood be sung into the sap, losing its own voice as it starts brewing in the wood. I brush my breath against your veins &
The tides that hold you together rise towards the moon
At the back of my mouth.
Webs Weaving Wombs
yes I knew, being a dyke
is an initiation of sorts:
you cast your spells in my mouth
and your presence takes me back to when
matter aligned against anti-matter:
a vortex of heart collisions
a fertile chaos. those strange primordial waters –
archives of queer myth.
the ash curled
underneath our bodies
declining/sloppy theories of masculinity
we revive soul waste from fossil layers
through the tectonic gaps
of our pelvic bones.
// we are sweating capitalist radiation en-masse //
bird songs
arrange new dialects of being
into the bones in-land.
bird songs
shake
the synthetic crust resting
on human eyeballs.
ferns accelerating
into heart space. ferns accelerating
into any
detectable spines.
slow tunes to soothe the unrested eyelids
i’m afraid of myself first:
of breaking my own boundaries.
I missed your hands and your body somehow pressed
against mine improvising
sculptures of care
under the blankets.
I’ll lick
the center of your celestial mass
&
wait for the
endless potentiality
to activate.
I touch your eyelashes with mine. can you develop
your dreams into
the cavities
of my backbone?
webs weaving wombs
in my sleep
in our sculptures in the dark our bodies eat
habits
of mythical thought.
a vortex of heart collisions
a fertile chaos.
one full circle return to the planetary dances.
lust resources flooding from earth skin to
those shores of becoming.
jupiter’s moons spinning around my neck,
the future wrapped in warm stones around my erogenous edges.
all soaked in petals of menstrual blood.
barefoot panic: instincts longing
for fields of wet twisted limbs, open mouths growling,
tides of pleasure-echos, potions dripping
from shattered hearts
ready to share, ready to heal.
Wetlands, Breathing
slowly ::: slowly caressing skin. butterfly wings
touching. fingers pressing gently
on the lines of the neck. first kiss. explosion of stars
and chrysalises in the cauldron
of my pelvic bones
“i don’t know why but your body feels so familiar”
from the bed to the floor, water splashing, fingers in a lion’s mane, your insides tasting like utopian fruit, strong arms, that smell I’d like to keep in my lungs as a present.
(first flower of winter: jasmine)
your eyes glowing in the dark/ nocturnal animals
our wombs in wetland
encoding ancestral languages.
we slept for one hour. the next day
my teenage self cried.
a healing breath into my unconscious bones:
the star of the depths
is in the eye of your lover.
celebratory fire engulfing my nervous system:
my guts wired to the sun/ my body cells spinning
in doses of volcanic joy. come here and kiss me with your tongue
listen to this magma singing
a lullaby in my mouth.
when we die we wake up in our celestial bodies
orgasming,
moaning births of suns.
until then,
your smile is my warmest
terrestrial home.
Poems by Byuka Makodru
Byuka Makodru is a trans & migrant workshop facilitator, dancer, movement director & poet. They explore folk futurism and practices of queer-animist world-building through performances, film, community rituals & workshops.
Their writing plays with ancestral healing, ecology, speculative fiction, disability justice, queerness and (re)enchantment. They have been published in Field Project Zine, Lesbians are Miracles, Luxury Literature Magazine, Aghh! Zine and Performing Borders.
Their work has also been shown at the Royal Albert Hall, Iklektik, Camden’s People Theatre, the National Gallery, Queer Circle, Ugly Duck, The Barbican, Guildhall, BBC Sounds and Mimosa House.
