Artist statement: Zoë and Geneva strongly believe in, and practice, writing as a tool to process, disrupt, unpack, and compost our colonial inheritances of whiteness, supremacy, and dominance, and as a necessary internal and collective process towards accountability and reparations. This piece is an excerpted letter exchange between Zoë and Geneva from the Summer 2026, as they wade through the muck and beauty of ancestral retrieval & reckoning—offering a vulnerable window into this accountability poetic practice as a commitment to ourselves, each other, our BIPOC kin, our future lineages, and to staying on the hook, in our writing and in our lives, wherever we go and whoever we are with.

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Necklace of lightning, their synchronous fizz 
doubling across the horizon, butting up against héoliènes, 
windfarms blinking red against night. Yesterday 
a tornado touched down in the neighboring county, a first 
in my thirty-three years in this Languedoc valley, the sky Wizard 
of Oz green. I wonder what thunder sounded like 
when my great-great-great-great uncle Rozier cut through 
the Mississippi valley on horse in 1807, 
if the fucked climate has changed even the oral capacities 
of the sky. When he touched the New World, my uncle, 
did he, too, look for echoes of his own French hills, 
same as I traced chicory’s August blues along Ada Hayden 
when I met Báxoje soil for the first time? 
Or was the appraiser inside him already at work
as he scanned the living land? I admit I swing in black and whites, G, 
though I try hard to let the people be people, alive especially 
on the page when my mind draws blank. But when I search
for something resembling his name—Rozier, meaning rosebush, 
the yellow blooms climbing my childhood home on the Dysse—
when I search for him in the Google streets 
of Nantes now, I find, newly, the city’s memorial to abolition, 
to the transatlantic slave trade, tucked in his hometown, which 
was a hot spot in the great kidnapping, number one 
on the route, and my endless questions spill even farther out—

It is insufficient just to name it, N says during a land 
acknowledgement in so-called Santa Fe: so much lost 
in the great unnaming, when this land was stripped of home 
and people, words and songs, and literally everything else. 

One step in the restitching—to speak names and homelands
back across the chasm of culture we have created. Earlier, in the car,
I tell M I can’t think about my ancestors without asking, 
What happens after we die? This is what I have been asking
all summer, Z: the humpback whales washed up by the dozens

on the Pacific shore, mountainsides of trees turned ash, my friend
whose body we sang over, throwing rose petal and chokecherry seed 
to blanket her now-stiff skin, and just last week, my great-uncle—
who hung my poems on his wall—letting go 
the same moment we buried the ashes of our family dog 
a hundred feet away. Where do we go? And what goes with us?

 Driving through what is now the Pueblo of Pojoaque, as if 
a homeland can be contained to a Google Maps square, I tell M, 
I cannot reckon this past without reaching towards revelation. 
I cannot confront this inheritance of violent void 
without confronting death & its after. I cannot lay my head down 
on this hard desert, where lightning flashes me awake, 
and our own body of planet shadows the near-full moon,
without feeling the dead of this land 
stretched out alongside me. Sleep-lost I sing 
to the dimming moonface, the same song I sang with you
over Báxoje soil, years ago: if I can dance with my shadow 
like the moon does with hers, then my fullness will shine brighter 
than all the stars. The past spirals out like a web 
I keep walking into, but never see coming: like the light of the moon
returning when we move out of its way— 

We rose the mountain in dark, 4am moon 
clouded, owls stitching song across valley. 
We slipped and spilled, trusted the flood-worn 
path, disheveled from the recent downpour, 
each stone upturned, rehomed. We sweat 
in the dark as the earth’s body reddened 
that full orb bite by bite, until light shone
only from the lip of her bowl.

Damp, huffing, we got to the top—le Rocher des Vierges, 
the boulder of the virgins—the wind whipped as if 
the world had slipped, moonless, was accounting 
its losses. Where do the dead go? What happens 
when we die, sunk back to soil? I know nothing 
of the virgins, though some say they were in love, 
and fled to the stone church on the top of the mountain 
to be together. I know little of this land in its long story, 
though the Occitan—whose language shepherds the road 
up in plaques of poetry for the garrigue—were first to sing here.
While the moon hangs like an enlarged paraglider over the hills, 
pinking, sunk, 
we sing

in the old church, in Georgian, 
in the Occitan we learned in the language revivalist collective, 
sing abat l’état policier, abat l’état—abolish 
the police state, sing it in polyrhythms, in rounds, stitches: 
the stone church widens, domes, 
lifts the prayers we sing into the flared candelabra 
we hiked up here with, each flame echoing 
through my camera’s lens as a small heart, as if 
to say, there you are, heart of my heart, 

though the dead we sing to are many,
their hearts flame-doubled, though the moon 
will slip soon below the horizon 
because we know she is there, of course she is, 
even when plainly out of sight—

Arnaé rewalks the Underground Railroad in ritual,
tells us the story of how her choir sang the same songs 
the old ones sang, on the long marches: the songs 
they whispered to themselves, to each other, at 4am, 
on moonlit, and moondark nights. Over 200 years old, this song
we sing together now: We want no cowards in our bend.
We call for valiant-hearted men that are not afraid 
to die. Not afraid to die. Not afraid to die, for what 
Arnaé says is that greater other side: that future 
worth dying for: Liberation for all. Later she asks us 
to sing to each other: Would you harbor me? 

Would I harbor you? She tells us to really ask ourselves:
would you? Be the safe harbor for a stranger. Open 
your door. Risk your life for another’s. On a podcast, 
Claudia Rankine says she asked a friend to harbor a Palestinian. 
The friend said no; and then never called her again. Rankine
admits even she did not take students in when they were
barred from school after protests. How do we grow courage? 
Fear is an inheritance, a survival strategy. It lives

 like a sore in the heart, sidled up right next 
to love, like those twin brothers we find in so many 
of the old stories. At night, sleeping on the scratch-dry grass,
I wake to coyote barks within a stone’s throw. I search 
the night. Find nothing. Hear the yips again. Inside,

the sore pulses, raises my hairs: wild, a voice rings within me. 
Old English for untamed, undomesticated: a word invented 
to discern that which we control and that which we don’t.
A word born of fear, to keep us and ours, safe. 
I sing would I harbor you to a room of strangers and know 
a very old, old English part of me would not. She would shrink
my harbor small, pull in just me and mine. She would close 
the door to a Palestinian family at the step, to a Black family
running with song through dark to freedom. She would hold a gun
close and shoot that coyote, if she needed to. An owl sings 

in the pre-dawn here too: the songs connect us
through time, space, sense. Let their sounds carry 
this confession to the stone church where you 
and your loves are growing courage. Send some back 
my way on the next moon rising, a little less full 
in the east. Speak some soothings to the militia 
of colonial cowards inside me. Feed a hearty soup to the scraggly, 
wild warrior crouched inside my shadowed corner, who knows 
fear is a prison for all—for me—

Soup. Song. The militia
of cowards: a harbor we feed
or refuse to tend. I believe retrieval
demands discernment between parts
to excise and parts to mend. Bring
your great-uncle. Your gun. Your blood
coyote-run. Bring the “virgins” and their church
and the old stone they hacked to rise it.
Bring the moon, partially calved this morning
as the hirondelles flock to feed their young
waiting in the mud they’ve labored 
into roof-slung homes. When white bodies 
get uncomfortable, bodies of culture die, 
reminds Resmaa. Years ago, driving the sliced
and mutilated body known as the state
of Iowa, over sad sandwiches at the Wagon 
Wheel Cafe, you told me there are some things
we should never feel comfortable about. 
I carry that stone with me, daily: how whiteness
has made a soft, dissociated bed for us.
Each day we start again the work
of rising: to dislodge its bulging 
mythology. To disavow a little louder now 
its reeked philosophy. Remembering
how the story becomes real, material: 
laying hands on the body: alive, torn, 
blood-born. The story feeding our militia
of fear-mongers, our lineage 
of invention, discretion. Above the clamor,
within the clamor, of the clamor, 
we remember risk
our only remaining prayer. Labor our last
love. And song: and song: singing
yes, I’ll harbor you, and you, and you—

Notes:

Resmaa referenced is healer, best-selling author, and racialized trauma specialist Dr. Resmaa Menakem.

Arnaé referenced is the Grammy-nominated singer, song leader, and Black movement leader Arnaé Batson.

The podcast episode referenced is the Between the Covers interview with Claudia Rankine, hosted by David Naimon and aired on August 3, 2026.

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