Stagger \\ 3 tankas

CW: harassment; gender-based violence

Stagger

It’s barely spring, the season just now eked out 
of longing and calendared consensus. The trees stretch 
their dry naked arms up and out, occasionally blossoming 
with plastic bags, malignant flowers flying long torn petals.  

The wind howls, as an average human 
with an average disabled body
walks into it, their hips swaying, their sap rising.
They have so much experience with walking like sex while 

working to not stagger, correcting for their fatigued thighs,
trashed hips, frayed cables in their ankles,
vise-pinched achilles tendons, tilted feet,
proprioception needle spinning like a demagnetised compass.

This calibrated wrangling is a dance, 
one no less complex than the seeming seduction 
of their walk, the sway — used to keep balance and
momentum and swagger, like a sailor’s stride on a pitching ship.

This body pitches all the time.
This body blooms all the radiance and grace
and hormones an average crip body does, which is 
to say, a lot. We’re a graceful, delicate people,

we who throw our bodies with precision when
they won’t stand, roll them when they can’t
do the more mundane thing and walk, weave them
down the sidewalk in a complex choreography —

one missed step and you fall down. Or, 
even worse, one missed step and a passing asshole
in a car with nothing to do on this 2am weeknight
sees you and recognises prey. It is the dearest

wish of my heart to never appear drunk.
My crip gifts eternally prevent me from 
alcoholising my body — but, whatever they tell you,
it isn’t being inebriated that renders you vulnerable,

it’s assholes thinking that you are, marking you with 
their fratboy-snigger, as if with paint, for extinction.
When this body walks, it’s twenty percent focused on breathing: 
steadily pulling and pushing air with the small muscles 

of the lung sacs, the tense sheet of the diaphragm, 
twenty percent on staying upright: gait regularly amended, 
arms swinging in careful counterpoint metronome, ten percent 
lurching autistic joy, hopped up on the music pouring through 

my ears — and fifty percent watching for predators.  
Tonight the sad bare trees make it easier to spot a striped 
skunk with its tail up, or a menacing human driving too slow 
past the curb. This body knows to walk in the opposite 

direction to traffic. This body knows dread, knows 
insults spat out of car windows, propositions like 
cigarette butts thrown out likewise, four tires slewing 
U-turn after U-turn on the quiet street to follow me home.

3 tankas

Handfuls
(for E)

My fingertips swoon
your breasts pool in my hands combs
of warm honey thick 
unbearably soft your bees
of nipples velvet at play.

Here
(for E)

I want to leave deep
footprints in your life to press
these words into your
eyelids neck hand lips breasts hips
and soft kitty: I was here.

Heavy Breathing
(for M)

That spring I had a
recurring fantasy of
reclining on your 
desk my long skirt pushed up legs
wide your tongue making me swoon.