The waves here were clear
last season, the swell 

placid and now salt makes a cloud
of the beach,

a cloud of you, the tendrils
of coconuts in sprout.

But I forgot to tell you
how I envy these brown men

who peel off jock straps
and let hang 

the dark fruit 
of last month’s burns.

A fence has gone up 
behind me—

no more cruising 
the goat trails—

and the sea grapes
have been cut

down. 

The world over, there is less
of the wild,

though in me it is sprouting.

//

Author’s Commentary:

The world needs more wild places. This is a queer ecopoetics that is not atavistic but is rigorously decolonial. Decolonial as in land back. Ecopoetic as in the green paintings of Salman Toor and the sexuality it shows is a forest reclaiming its footing. What is gayer than the earth?

Salman Toor’s work is described as dreamy and sexually charged. And for me it absolutely is. It illuminates the life of a brown queer with queer meetings and pleasures from public group sex to masturbation in private. I am drawn to the idea of sex as sexual practice, the hope to rewild the world while we are increasingly surveilled and our desires and bodies are increasingly legislated. Our spirits have never grown more muscular. At least this is my prayer in the time of waning signs of Divinity. 

Toor’s painting A Meeting Place takes me to the grassy expanse of Kaimana Beach on O‘ahu and to the goat trails of Mokulei‘a on the North Shore where I remember public acts from 2013-2017. I was saddened to learn that the good Christians of the world razed the forest behind the beach, leveling the hiding spots and gay warrens, and that the beach was no longer as queer as it was. This was a further act of colonizing an occupied land, a policing of public space and training it into the fantasy of what they want their pristine land to be. But this is all settler fantasy anyway, Hawai‘i being an American occupied nation.  

Toor’s A Meeting Place makes me think of our little acts of autonomy and jouissance as resistance to occupation. Fanon’s lumpenproletariat dancing their ungovernable dance.

Part of the decolonial queer method is to yield back to Caesar his (white cis-het) names for us and remember what our bodies have been teaching us all along is our own native countries of spirit. Pre-colonization there were more genders than two or three. Giving land back to the occupied (Gaza, Turtle Island, Hawai‘i) is the first step towards giving back the land of the queer body to its own undelineated, wild ecologies. 

//

(Note: Salman Toor’s A Meeting Place is not in the public domain, which is why we’ve linked to it above.)