When in Pain-fuck it; make art
Long covid – just another day
You ever wish you had someone
You could call
When the air in your chest feels so sparse, you have to rest your head against a wall
You look down-see your dog
She looks up concerned and alert
And even though you feel the pounding in your head and the ringing in your ear, you lean down and pet her softly and say
I need you.
Because you might if you can’t handle this act of a walk afterall
Just Another Day
My body is in a crash.
I often wonder if this will be the type of crash that leaves me wounded for a moment,
A day, a week or has all these years just been the crash.
Will it ever go away?
Am I the crash or is that just this moment wounding me in yet another new surprising way
My body is in a crash, but I can’t stop it
Whatever long covid puts its mind to in my body,
It sure does like to really push the thresholds of it
Reminding me that it just might not
Ever go away.
A Story as it Gets Told
Becomes life and love and learning and yearning colliding with the hopes and the dreams finding their place amongst this turbulent time we cannot control as we look around to see a distressed world in need of a softening touch instead of the greed and violence destroying all it tolls.
We get to be better than the ones who wreak the havoc with or without a care in their world—we get to be defiant with our boldness and beauty, our queerness and hope for humanity to wake up from this zombie hold. Let go of the demons who control and begin to shed the skin until we can hold what is real and raw in the burgeoning sun. Or let the rich raze us all to the ground with their hypocrisy and hatred bombing and hoarding until there’s nothing left to be stolen. Just because they have paved this way doesn’t mean there isn’t a way to deconstruct it and find a new way to lead with the soul of this earth instead of fueling the fossils wasted away from the machines pumping them to our demise. A demon in a suit with a gleen.
Dreams of a Day without Long Covid
A day without illness
I I wonder what it might look like—a day without illness. As impossible as it sounds or feels—throw the logic out the window if not just to dream -b luther; 2/14/2026
I would wake up before the sunrise, and sit by the window with some coffee and music in my soul while I watch the birds on my patio starting the joy in the day.
With a dance in my step, i would flit about the room; getting ready and grabbing my skateboard before starting my day.
Lavishly Loaded—the longboard that unlocks the rhythm of the pavement vibrating through my veins while my dancing is the engine the wheels crave—I hear the wheels hit the pavement just as I press play and let the music guide my way down the streets of of my home, Harlem which will also be bursting with laughter and song. I already know my hills I crest will take to me to the Hudson and along city line. I will take in each and every moment like a still that needs a gentle touch and dimmed lights to perfectly procure its image.
I won’t take a moment for granted—whether I falter or fall or soar through the breeze, i will remember breezy was what my father would call me in handwritten letters signed by a stickman for his name.
I will remember the connection and hold that as I let my body weave and curve to the beat living through my veins and expressing themselves on these streets. I would take in the heat of the summer sun in New York and stop by my favorite pier seldomly noticed by tourists, it is a staple in my heart while I write out a poem to the beauty of the day.
There would be no need to don a mask or filter myself while i express my whole being for the world to see. May it be a gift for friendships to come or strangers to smile unexpectedly. May it be just for me and for whoever may need it as they take those daggers out of our sides and hold the surrender with an ecstasy. Knowing our metaphorical wounds are essential to heal by coming unclean and letting our hands hold what the future might mean.
Let it be a gift regardless of the curse, because your day can be perfect even if the world needs more time to come undone. There will be the hope in the defiance that wins when we bridge the gaps with our art and our passion, love and community, the intention built across the divide—ready to be the storm that dismantles the corruption and its systems they created.
May there be a jazz band in the background while I write this in the West Village while I swing my soul with this pen under the safety of a tree that’s known this city longer than this city has known the millions walking past it. There’s still so much day to go, and my heart already feels so full.
What would it look like to have just one day where my dreams become reality?
Is it long covid or did my mind get bored
The words out of my mouth
Keep falling behind
No Mather what you say, it seems to replay words misused
Like teasing hair until it laughs out of fright
But that’s just the brain fog thinking for me—I imagine him to be a standup guy
Not in the ethereal sense—like an able asshole standing on stage opening his mouth to say a thing he already knows won’t land, but here he fucking goes
And then I wonder if the other bits of me are still in there—under a fog or is it gone; like brain damage gone
Or is it the gone like atrophy in a collision with exhaustion and my lungs and brain just need to find themselves in sync again gone
And that’s about as far as I let myself go because my imagination can build spirals faster than I can type (or swipe; I find it easier on this mangled hand connected to the short circuited nerves connected to the foggy brain . . .)
All you need to do to get there is
use those screws for ladders and
step on whatever they replaced
my spine cushions with
and you’ll be there
Unless of course you catch my body on a bad day and you get jolted
back to the knee
which only the cap is made up of the more organic me—But I suppose these are words will still tell a story all the same so I will call it a poet
Even if my heart doesn’t quite beat like my poetry could when it danced with my mind
Maybe that’s the biggest grief of it all
Turns out this mosaic is made up of broken glass, because I can see it
all twisted up and refusing to apologize for existing
And I also still exist, so why shouldn’t long covid swallow my whole
It’s what it likes
until everything I once knew was just a story I once lived through
Less me but even more less you
Just screws in bones that use these feelings like strings bringing me back from the end
Hoping there will be seeds where we sew
It’s happening again
My shortness of breath is haggard and I can feel my heart beating the best it can to get my lungs some more air. But there’s also the weight—the labored way your body struggles to do something everyone says you take for granted. I did not take my breath for granted, but I do miss it.
My rambling on my brain fog and how to live with this new thing disrupting my mind all the damn time.
What do you do when the words don’t match
Like the word in your mind just didn’t fit the words you say aloud; the air as daft as the meaning, except
You. Used. To. Know.
You used to know the word, the meaning
You could hold them softly in your mind as they scrawled onto the page
—beautifully held even if only you knew what it meant—
But now the words are letters jumbled together; scrunched to fit where the brain fog isn’t housed.
You are sure what it is housing, or why it is called fog when what it feels like is a stunt in your step; a falter not in your understanding but in your ability to convey its meaning
And then you hear the sound of
Will it even be heard? Who wants the voice of a broken mind trying to mend itself and find its new voice
And so you say nothing and the silence becomes the entire room
You exude the emptiness the way you used to exude a smile and passion for stories, creative and divine.
You even used to love the blank space between words—the moment when your breath would hitch but you knew there would be a bend and turn that could unravel all that was inside.
But the past two years have been a learning all of its own. How to hold books again so that the book can become love and not pain struggling in your hand. The words can ignite pictures to life instead of just lay there dulling against the static inside my brain trying to remember what it means again.
And then there is the explaining of the unexplainable and people looking at you, or through you, or even truly holding space with you
While you struggle to understand how to hold it for yourself
Wanting to be patient and kind with myself while also having no patience or kindness when I need it most
And I could call is isolation or cruel culture systemic tactics
And both would be true, since 47 has even taken the long covid research program away that I’ve been clinging onto with whatever hope I had about finding out just what the fuck this fog actually is and whether it is something that also can heal or just a new me I need to hold a little more dear
But maybe that is just what it is—living with long covid in a country that doesn’t value humanity over capitalistic gain
But that doesn’t mean I will lose my hope just because I’ve lost my ability to speak with breadth
I just might need a little more love and care as I stumble to find what word it was I wanted to use to say how beautiful this world still is.
Doesn’t flow like a river still r feel like petals from a flower
But I suppose they are still mine
All the same
Briah Luther; they/them
My Last Surgery my mother was alive; This one she isn’t
Reflection 7/2/2023: A Voice Note to my mother, someone I wish I could call to hear her voice and hear her tell me it will be okay even if it won’t because I know she would absolutely undeniably believe it.
Testing. They say you know it has gotten bad when food that you order just yesterday is in the fridge and because the coloring of the vegetable has gotten onto the rice you are taken back to the times where you didn’t have food. it’s almost like flash but a Feeling, you get to fly face first into that starving hunger knowing that nothing’s going to come and then you hear the voice. the voice isn’t yours, but it’s someone you love deeply and even though that voice is tied to this trauma, and that voice is no longer living to hear new words, you have found yourself in the last few weeks letting that voice become the loudest voice in your head. and maybe that’s what grief does when you aren’t cognizant of when it sneaks up. maybe grief is that moment of realizing that you can no longer connect with this thing and you would rather have even the hardest most traumatic moments of that relive again and again then let go and heal in order to trust that you do now have food that you can eat. to tell that little bee that they are safe now, they’ve always been safe even when they’re surroundings were unsafe because they have found a way to get through each moment and the goal now is to live this moment and it’s Presence by honoring that pain of my past. So I put on some Rolling Stones and took the believe in you rock and I am going to remember. Remember the day I made this rock and gave you a call.
I don’t know if I ever told you, but your voice has always been a sense of pride for me. I know people would call you all day, and you’d pick up the phone and they would immediately call you Mr. Luther, and you would correct them with such a confidence that seemed surreal. Something I didn’t know how to do. Something I only knew how to pretend to do-which was to be more like you. I knew you were the tommest of all the boys, didn’t understand girls very much and you always found yourself in the center–your ability to shine, ignite, create, destruct seemed to come from somewhere else deep within you. I could see the beauty of your life shadowed by the hardship and abuse, and then you had this superpower ability to create your own world. For better and for worse, you gave up all control of the things around you and created what you needed in order to survive in the world around. And I want to remember that voice you did show often–the vulnerable one where you would ask for advice and guidance and you found value in my work in education and my pursuit to create and cultivate beautiful classrooms full of Montessori teachings of joy and wonder through the untapped mind.
And this was a life changing moment for me. I had gotten the opportunity to get my Montessori credential through my school who took a chance on someone who had no money (and didn’t believe in a future that has even been lived this long). I got to learn from the best Montessori minds, the most empathetic, kind, curious, skillfully tactful, and then I got to bring my own flare. My relentless effort to create a foundation of an ideal socio-emotional space where we work together to overcome our challenges and celebrate our success and holding ourselves gently through restorative accountability. Something I didn’t see much of in my life. What I saw was good people enduring bad things so much that they lost what they needed to be their authentic selves to the richest of worlds pretend none of it exists. I have been on both ends-the invisible world and the center of the limelight, and I had a goal to use what I learn to better the world however I can and whenever those inconceivable hardships were throw into my life, I found myself creating my own world to battle the constructs of violence and hate. And here I was in a training learning how to tell a story that introduces the importance and beauty of rocks and then I had this idea to create your own importance and beauty by understanding who you are inside and what you want to strive for-with the final part of thanking the people along the way.
And that is where these stories collide, because even though you used your world to hide yourself from the terrors which shaped too much of your life, you also taught me how to use it to create these beautiful pictures of reality that could be obtainable if we all found a way to work towards that common goal. And the thank you was because I believed in myself because I saw you teach me how to believe in anything if you put your mind and actions to it. I believed in you and I let you know that while I was on the carpeted floor of a classroom filled with soon to be teachers who had never met someone who had beaten death and poverty to be the first person in their family to graduate from college (and high school), let alone pursue higher education through my two master programs I was apart of. And that beautiful moment where I believed in myself (and did, in fact, achieve both of those goals) was because you taught me how to believe in anything regardless of what you face that blocks your path. And now, I have a pretty scary day ahead of me that will once again change the trajectory of my life for the billionth fucking time since this covid apocalypse. So I will hold this rock instead of holding onto the voice that frightened me into denying my pain for years in order to get to a safer place outside of my family life, outside of the oppressive violence I face every day for being who I am and loving how I love, and for believing in everyone deserving the right to have the basic necessities and opportunity to cultivate a peaceful more intentional world. And for months I have been holding onto that voice because it was the one that also taught me how to stop breathing in a perfectly oxygenated room because I didn’t want to lose your voice in my head after hearing it on the voicemail so many months ago when you called with that rose colored voice about an emergency within the family that happened but you didn’t want me to know until you knew she was okay, and I find myself somehow hiding in the same cycle not understanding how to pull my voice out. Except it is me in the danger and the need for a surgery, and I know I need to let people know. So I am breathing through the gasping for air. Reminding me that someone doesn’t have their hand on my neck anymore. That I am safe. I am scared, sure–but I. Am. Safe. I am safe. I am safe and the people I call or reach out to will only hold me with love and kindness. And if they can’t because of how the reality of where my crossroad of a life has brought me, then I can forgive that too. Forgive me when I didn’t know how to do that without falling through the cracks every step of the way. I am facing it though, and for the first time in a long time, I feel it. I believe in me. I will believe in you. And I will let myself believe in others to pick me up and hold me instead of telling me to deny my pain or my fear. To believe they won’t physically harm me even if that has been my experience with love in the past. I don’t have to hide until I am perfect anymore than I need to receive abuse or unsafety in order to prove I am worthy of love.And even as these tears streamed on my cheek if I admit I have all of these things and I hold all of these pieces and parts, some of which never belong to me but I have to carry until I can shed and heal. I am working through it and I believe in me, I believe in you, and I’m going to believe that this is going to be okay.
**Will have mistakes as I am in too much pain to type so I used voice recording to dictate my thoughts** Leaving it for the authenticity and vulnerability it took to do this.
briahluther 