Perhaps you have reached the moment when your tears begin to water the seeds you forgot were planted beneath you. Tears that fall like baptisms into the soil of your becoming. Yearning becomes a nourishment you never asked for, a wetness seeping into the roots of a life that still wants you. It moves through you the way a lover studies the lines of your body with deliberate attention, tracing where your strength trembles and where your softness hides. Something in you has been turning beneath the surface, stretching itself awake, asking to be touched by a deeper darkness. And though this season is draped in shadow, you continue to glow in the lives of others with a warmth that startles even you, as if your own light is a secret you keep stumbling upon.

You give as if your heart is a vessel without a bottom. The mystery of giving is that it empties you, and you can finally hear that quiet voice inside asking what comes next. And who inside me dares to answer?

What will you name the season that approaches? You have survived the comedy that taught you to laugh with your whole mouth, and the tragedy that carved its lessons into your ribs. You have already awakened an ancient animal within you that knows survival intimately. Remember once waking with your mind clawed raw, its walls scratched by memories that refused to be gentle. Is it a time to trust what you can see, or can you allow yourself to move through the world unseeing for a while? You brace for impact because the memories of your past have a way of turning themselves into guardians. They linger like fingerprints on the soul, reminders of the times you rose too early without the luxury of preparation.

Close your eyes and feel this truth. You are not walking toward disaster. You are walking toward revelation, toward a slow burn of an encounter with yourself, one that leans into you the way bodies move closer without permission or language. You are entering a moment where nothing inside you can be ignored. Offer your life to the road ahead, for you sculpt it with fire, and the ashes behind you are not ruins but evidence that you have returned to yourself again and again.

Delight at your petals, you are a flower blooming in unlikely spaces, one that demands tenderness, patience, and a kind of touch that honors both beauty and fragility. It is allowed to retreat into the privacy of your inner world. Those who love you deeply do not demand performance. Love gently holds the doorway open and waits for your return. Do not rush this withering. Let the cold season press itself against you. Let yesterday’s ease melt like memory on the tongue. Taste it and ask yourself how something already gone can still live simply through remembering. Winter will show you what remains loyal.

There is a luminous intelligence woven through your suffering, the same intelligence that teaches the constellations how to remain faithful to their paths. What moves through you now is not punishment. It is a summons. It calls you to listen with the entire landscape of your being. Sit with your loneliness. It carries its own erotic truth, its own way of stirring desire for life. Sit with the hunger, the longing, the echo that returns when the world finally grows quiet in response to you. Sit with it the way a student sits beside a teacher whose presence is felt rather than spoken. Listen for the sounds guiding you toward closure, the soft release inside your chest as your soul exhales what it can no longer hold.

This is the pain that draws you closer to your own humanity. The pain that opens rather than breaks. Something is coming toward you. Someone is coming toward you. In forms you cannot yet name. The universe is arranging its constellations on your behalf. A door opens in your future and it calls you by name with the intimacy of breath brushed across your ear.

Answer the call.

On Planetary Contacts with Pluto

-Gazi

Sometimes

I love a flower

I want to pin it to my chest

like a flag torn from the ruins of a lost land

wear it as evidence that I’ve been feeling

that I’ve survived this age of spectacle

What’s with all this surviving?

I consume it like sugar hoarded during wartime

boil it down to syrup

bathe in its sweetness

let it be the first thing on my tongue at the dawn of revolution

I want to become its fragrance,

Thread it into a garment,

wrap the world in it as a silken reminder

that beauty is here within these fences drawn

Can I hang it from the highest peak?

Proclaim a new era under its petals,

Declare:

I have seen softness survived the machine.

I would sit alone beneath it,

sulking in my patriotism,

as if devotion where uniform I could wear,

as if love could make me sovereign.

A wise friend said if you love the flower,

leave it alone.

you did not colonize its bloom,

you must let the petals fall

without rushing to make a poem from the silence

you become still enough to hear a miracle

humming inside the stem

anxiety is the echo of war

still playing on loop

in the background of our breath

and we starve

because of an Earth made profitable

and love, transactional

still this flower gives

you cannot buy your way back into belonging

you must recall your name before profit had a tongue

I am made from those who fed strangers

and their existence undocumented

deed without translation

I love louder, the thump of my efforts

imprints last forever

back into the soil we’ll go

only the brave fall all the way inward

the emptied are those who become conduits

I leave the flower

I let it exist.

It’s wild boom takes roots in my reason

without my fingerprints on its meaning

in that unmaking…

I bloom.

-Gazi

I’m a centimeter from Divine

seeking something just to bind.
The light switched rooms,


didn’t shut the door behind.


Attention spilt,

I slip, 
still drawn to center,

by a gravity I crave to flip, 

to slay, to sever. 

Calling you by a name

that never was yours

the naming of the thing

built walls, not doors.

This house, full of absence,

a child at the edge,

just a gaze from grace,

Always witnessed.

Never fed 

But saving face.

Make me a child of yours


I’ve never been.


Let my past dissolve


in the shape of your skin  

The sun in you.

a warmth unbroken


by the frostbite of now,


I’ll deposit my love 
just don’t show me how you withdraw.

Conditional me.

Love ain’t capital.


It vanishes when counted.

The world wants itself back
aching, wrecked,


lust-wrapped,

greed-stacked,


lies dressed in velvet 
tempt the soul to bend its spine,

forget its height,


unsee the climb.

I danced to cruel tempos


til ground was lost 

I am held in all my searching


In gravity-less stillness,


no weight, no name


where glory fades


and the heights feel the same.

Metal feeds metal.


humans pay the toll


Fruit never opened


Warmth never showed.


A mother, thin with waiting,


passes all her bread.

who is really living 
in a world gone dead?

who is really living 
in a world gone dead?

-Gazi

I was born as the second coming to my bloodline. My father, Ra, a North Star to the feral woman growling softly, seeking vacation from a loveless life. Behind his celestial gaze lurked an underworld, a profound, magnetic abyss that drew her in. Oya, the tempest's lover, yearned for the storm to reveal the depth of her own fierce nature. And so, I manifested as a bolt of lightning, an overwhelming force of disruption, crashing into existence with a cry so thunderous it shattered the silence, holding mirrors to the shadowy corridors within and illuminating the depth of the darkness that lay hidden.

She could not bear to hold me for long…no. I was a river of red, an untamed flood in her heart, and she, a woman steeped in blues, sang the lament of a world she could no longer hold. "This child," she said, "is a spell, one I cannot confront, cannot undo." I was a myth reborn in her womb, a tale older than time, dressed in the flesh of the now.

I did not always bring wrath. Once, I remember a time when the Earth was still, and there was no storm. Delight passed through the quiet chambers of the world, where undercurrents spoke in whispers, where moss flourished without care. My claws gripped the soil, soft and inviting, as I ascended rocks to meet the Goddess at the hour of Jupiter’s gaze. I bathed in the purest waters, thanking them for their cooling embrace. It was there, in that sacred moment, that I left behind traces of myself, secretion that would later become the first sighting of honey, an elixir of sweetness unknown to the human tongue.

I sang to a cosmic lover, his name carried on the breath of distant stars, tracing his fleeting form across the canvas of the night sky. In the dream state, we met—his presence, a pulse. The exhale of his breath summoned a soul from the tomb of forgotten time, a resurrection steeped in the echoes of lost rituals. A transmission of psychic flame, a rekindling of an age-old ceremony. My hunger for the world I once knew became ravenous, as if I were consuming the very essence of existence itself. Must I love with such aching, a bloodlust toward the instrument that plays its dissonant song upon my heart? After an embrace such as his, I questioned the truth of all things, as the world before me pleads the fifth, its secrets locked away in shadow.

Now, I walk in a city where neglect reigns, where the ground cracks open to remind us that life pulses beneath the surface, yet the concrete is but a cruel metaphor for a soul left to wither. How easily we forget the warmth of breath, how easily we slip into the indifference of existence when death’s refrain echoes through our every step. The plague of apathy, like a spectral shadow, haunts my neighbors, and yet the Sun, life’s eternal witness, shines down upon us all, illuminating a yesterday that has already begun to fold into tomorrow. Yesterday, beneath the weight of tomorrow’s sound, yet I defy the pull of time, listening to the pulse of today.

My bones ache with the capacity to hold space, as though I emerged from the earth a moment before my own decay, saved by the hand of fate itself. Yet, neglect...a ghostly presence, lurks in every corner, in every house I try to call my own. I pierce into my skin, digging deeper, attempting to re-engineer my DNA, and find that I’ve dug into the Milky Way, unearthed Atlantis in the folds of my being. Insecurity knocks, yet there is no door to answer. I sit in silence, watching as the unknown sways to the rhythm of a siren’s call while I sleep.

Here is where the lost are gently found, where the wanderer's steps rediscover their rhythm on the winding coast of memory. Feet, once uncertain, find their grounding in shifting sands. Spines unfurl, taut with tension, as limbs awaken to a force they can no longer deny; hips sway, irresistibly pulled by a familiar hand, and love…love is longing to be claimed by what was always just beyond reach. Remember how you were molded, before flesh and thought began to shape you. Yes! remember the essence that existed before all else. Pleasure, a fleeting ghost, dances just out of reach, as close as I'll ever come.

Good morning, my dear. Forbidden desire visits me in the stillness of my subconscious’s monologue, a seductive threat, a kiss waiting to be stolen. Look out the window, what have you become? The trees stand bare, their bark stripped away, a vulnerability that endangers their very existence. Look closer, and see who still stands amidst the wreckage. How ironic! There is no escaping the civilization that I am Mother to.

-Sekhmet (Gazi)

I long for those quiet, awkward silences that often stretch between people to become something more. A stillness where hearts can breathe together, where even the empty spaces hold meaning. Let the moments of silence not be marks of disconnection, but of deep understanding, where unspoken truths hum like a quiet melody between us. I pray that the cries we hear in the night, the raw, visceral sounds of pain and longing become the precious calls inviting us to witness and to understand. May they reveal what it feels like to know what it is to be enveloped in love so deep that it peels back all that it is not.

If I am to embody the change I yearn to see, patience must be my compass, my guide. Without hesitation, without shame, I embrace love as the salve for all wounds, the balm for every ache. I know that love, when poured freely, will crystallize into everything I need, and in its overflow, it will become the source from which I can give to others. There is a strength within me, an unyielding force that grows ever more potent as I recognize that it is love that sustains me, that fills the vacant spaces, that grants me the courage to face each new day. It is love that has shown me who I am, and I have found that love reflected in the eyes of those who see me with grace, who hold me in my most fragile and radiant moments. In their presence, I am reminded of the truth of myself, and in their love, I have learned to be whole.

How rich and complex this world is, a swirling dance of contrasts, of beauty and decay, of joy and sorrow. I am too filled with contradictions. There is such disparity you see wealth hoarded by few while others are left to sift through the dust of their forgotten dreams. We are shaped by what we hold, and yet so often, what we hold is a hollow thing: empty words and heavy hearts. The division cuts deep, yet there is beauty even in the brokenness, in the fractures. I tread carefully in the space between, accumulating the texture of every hand I’ve ever held, the warmth of a palm pressed against mine, the roughness of calluses earned through hard labor, the tenderness of a touch meant to comfort. I carry the depth of every gaze I’ve ever met, the sparkle of eyes filled with hope, the weariness in eyes that have seen too much, the fire in eyes that refuse to be extinguished. I am marked in the colors of every story told. The ones spoken softly in the dark, whispered between old friends, shouted in the face of injustice. These textures are the fabric of my soul, and with each one, I come closer to understanding what it means to walk between the extremes, to seek the middle ground. But how do we find it together? At once, in a moment? How do we meet one another in this place when we are pulled in so many directions?

The sentiment rings true: people love in the ways they need to be loved. We pour ourselves out in the ways we are thirsty. We pour from vessels that are both brimming and bone-dry, depending on what we’ve known, what we’ve lacked, what we’ve craved. The need to give is bound up with the need to receive, and in this delicate dance, the one who observes becomes the greatest lover. The observer, steady, patient, able to witness, they are a keeper of truth. Their gaze is a sacred thing, capable of digesting the rawness of existence. They do not flinch from the wreckage. They do not look away. They stand steady in the presence of sorrow and joy alike, able to hold the fragile beauty of it all. And so, there is a dying world before me, a world bruised by neglect and worn by time, with a quickening heartbeat yearning to be carried back to the forgotten song of its first dawn. I do not flinch. In the past, I’d miss the cue from the prophet disguised as a beggar. So now, I live reminded I am in a world gasping for its breath and exhale my longings.

How can I turn away from the planet gasping beneath the weight of our indifference?When will we, the makers of change, choose to love as our fate and at the hands of free will? How many lifetimes must we live before we understand that the cure for all this is nearer than we dare admit? It is not far off, not a distant dream, nor a far-flung hope. It resides here, within the space beneath our skin, in the rhythm of the blood that courses through our veins. If we could only see it…if we could only choose it…love would make all things new.

12/18 -Gazi

Do you know what it requires to relax in water?


Nothing. Nothing at all.

Water held us before anything ever did. 
All water ever required was your existence.

Yet what do we find?


Our body tenses, instinctively, almost sadly…. because we know water’s power. We know it can swallow as easily as it supports, and still that revelation does not undo the truth that water has given us life. It never has.

There are things that breathe life into you in the same way

quietly, steadily, faithfully…
yet you deny your immersion into them. 
You ration your yes.
 And in that hesitation, your gifts begin to perish under the weight of your own resistance.

That inner sabotage becomes a subtle guide away from what feels too alive and too possible.

But notice…. The world is still speaking.

See how the light of the day shifts when you step outside. Hear how a single conversation can scratch open a wound you forgot you bled from, rerouting the path of something in you. Watch how a story, a song, a memory lands in your chest like dust finding an open wound not because the story is new, but because you were ready to feel.

Everything is speaking to you. 
Everything is speaking from you. 
You and the world are not separate. 
You’re within the world.

Now Saturn moves through Pisces and these waters hold relentless pressure for those who cannot float. It dissolves the sharp lines and the brittle edges we cling to because we’re afraid to let go. It reminds us that structure need not be stone. That discipline can cradle the depths. That maturity can be a kind of surrender.

Misalignment won’t work anymore. The currents beneath you are rising. 
Pisces is the water tugging at you when you uphold a lie, when you clench, when you operate from fear or fantasy. 
Pisces is the other face in you…the face you hide when life demands predictability and control.

This transit asks you to notice where you still mistrust the very elements that can heal you and to build a quiet discipline by showing up every day to engage them anyway. This is about building endurance towards surviving the unknown. The moments that usually slip past you are crucial now. They are the living thread between all your actions and the life unfolding around you. They are the subtle link between every choice you make and the direction of tomorrow.

Can you take responsibility for the actualizing of your dreams? Whether you dream for the world or for yourself, what must be clarified so that true fulfillment can finally reach you? Checking out of life is not cutting it, girly pop. Feel your two feet on the ground. What are you willing to endure for the life you want? That is where your life force goes. That is where pleasure begins.

We all dream a dream long before we know how to speak it. Before the world teaches us to call our longing naive, we dream because some deep part of us remembers choosing that dream as our reason for being. Saturn in Pisces invites you to create the conditions for the miraculous. It softens your suspicion toward what you once dismissed as unrealistic. Ask yourself where that skepticism began. Who taught you to question the reliability of desire? Notice how pulling away from your dreams has drained your vitality, how hiding them has separated you from the very process that makes them real.

Saturn now calls you to demystify your becoming. You are not separate from your dreams. You are the vessel through which they arrive.

So swim with the tide of collective longing. This water will not drown you.

Alignment is not something you wait for. It is something you practice.

2/22/24

Transit Report

-Gazi

And I’ve found

myself most identified

with the tear,

a soft traveler down my cheek,

gracing me

with the holiness of shrinkage.

A baptism in smallness.

It’s only here

in the narrowing

that your breath reaches me.

like wind making a song

through the bones of my spine.

You hum me whole.

There is no place

where we are not,

your presence curled

in the hollow of my ribs,

my breath

a prayer inside your mouth.

Still,

I scramble

for a border

But metamorphosis

has no neutral ground.

It thrusts,

a wildfire lover,

demanding I master

the mirage of separation.

My shadow studies the script

of a well-lived life,

reads it aloud

to the morning light

that spills like grace

across the foot of my bed,

as wind chimes

speak to me beauty.

I think of you then,

Your absence

shapes my wanting

into worship.

There are days

when the longing

feels like union,

like desire

has your fingerprints

and there still pressed

against my skin.

And maybe

this is the cruelest kind of intimacy,

to be sculpted

by what will not come back.

Good grief,

you were never in vain.

You are

the quiet

I have been answering

my whole life.

9/4 11:11pm -Gazi

She is plutonic

grasping on to the depth of all

hoping that she won't fall out of place,

and expose the lack of grace that surrounds her existence

Is it that eye fear leaving the abyss?

knowing that the surface requires me to learn to exist

without pain

you might call that the mundane

but my ability to see all that is restrained

is the very thing that keeps me welcoming the rain

and the toxins in the water keep the illusions the same

manifesting cycles to remind me why I came

to learn love, not the depicted complacency

that has me running from experiencing that are anchoring me

hoping to try on skins,

eye emerge from diving in,

there's something about a union

that forces me into my yin

but the echoes of my life,

make me cultivate that within

scared exchange with my past

I've gained from what's been

my essence you cannot pin

I'm burning down to break in

I'm a product of my roots

the world was birthed from sin…

-Gazi

I walked up to the shore to admire the ocean, and in that instant I felt Neptune’s rise, she slipped straight past my defenses. I drowned before the waves even reached me.

The sea stretched and its blue never settled into certainty, streaked with drifting browns and pale threads of foam that curled and unfolded as though they held stories that included my name. Above it, the sun forcing its way through a cloud, scattering loose ribbons of orange and rose across the sky. It was half formed, as if reality itself were reconsidering its shape.

From a distance the water seemed almost contemplative, its movements measured, its breath steady. But the nearer I stepped, I found myself at my knees, she who tickled my fears, her seductive allure challenging me to accept fate. Before I knew it, she folded me into her depths as though I had always belonged there.

Some days I tell myself I am searching. It comforts the mind to assume direction, even when the ground keeps dissolving beneath it. But as day one hundred and twenty two approaches, that belief thins like mist in morning light. I feel less like a seeker and more like someone suspended in a landscape that changes the moment I try to grasp it.

Yet amid the disorientation there is something that feels strangely familiar.

I drift because she intends it.

Gazi, excerpt from 2022 David Zwirner Summer Zine