Two Poems

self storage

Lockboxing selves, the everyday
apocalypse of property

a veil; a massacring distortion

the stuff of our lives our lives

always elsewhere,
a kept safe.

nest + feed

after Teknolust

The housing unit, the parcel of land— 
neither is a nest, though in and on them, we
do. My body, thinking you; the poem,
an afterthought or cyborg babe. And

all this facing
the vacated apartment
units several blocks away,
columnar windows shooting blanks
across the readied void. But

this poem was meant for
my love, who acts.

How to be some Ruby, tender and fetching
succulent protein;

automaton turned huntress
for Olive and Marine,
orchard and sea joined
in gashlight bleat.

How the taken fact of
nests might yet hold open future hows

and ways in which. Tilda has
made it so very charming. Life
as infinite thought feeding
off donuts and cum. But
the ebullient rube
never paid rent,

and financialized housing
markets have nothing

to do with nests
and everything to do with punishment.

What had been homes has been
sanded into a gray and impossible expanse,
land held captive and terra nulled by the
police, bidding the prospectors come.

And so

I dream the empties
fill with bees, and then
I fill them. Sky
lights, grown
mutinous, tear rooftops
open to fielding and

sky. The same sky
under which my love, I feed.

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Knar Gavin (they/any) is an educator, song-fiddler, and community defense organizer living on unceded Lenni-Lenape lands in so-called Philadelphia. A second-generation Armenian-American settler, they are committed to anti-capitalist struggle, abolition, and most urgently, Palestinian liberation. Recent poetry and other writings have appeared in AGNI, Annulet, Ballast, Diagram, Etc., Environmental History Now, and niche.

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