welcoming home your feral fierce

Over the Moon by Rob Gonsalves

Feral fierce fem.

I don’t know yours. 

I want to.

Your fierce as fuck feral fierce wouldn’t scare me as she did. 

I can witness the power of this champion of yours as she flames 

with her angers and sorrow-songs 

carved wide and shaped into steeliness with spit and sweat 

woven through the marrow of your bones

as you walk your ways. 

These etched marks made by the narrow

the restrictions of being shoulds and coulds

of being smaller

neater

nicer 

quieter

grooved into your flesh 

and she moans to move with wings.Uncaged and unfurled.

Unapologetically unyielding, glorious in her flaming. 

This She of yours, she doesn’t scare me now. 

I’ve met mine. 

I met her in a studio, blazing and mud covered, 

twigged, wild and terrifying, 

a protector so complete, feral and certain.

Heartsure of what she is fierce for. 

Her feral purpose, a part and more than whole

with forceful fears, timid and ravenous for this unknown terrain, 

this territory of untethering from too tight, too small spaces 

shimmying and stomping across the big sky of bold

grounded in ancestral fields ploughed by all felts and unsaid.

Riding (and fighting) her accompanying waves of deep sorrow, 

the grief of not knowing her and longing to love her well

to sweetly cherish the delicacies of this fierce face

and her spirit-sister, mistrust, 

she gapes at the wisdom in her fight, the resident protector-love-fire, 

flaming with tenderness fuelled by the insatiable heat 

of injustices, inequalities, aloneness, other.

These stifling confines, to be sweet, sugared, powdered 

and less the surprise of tongue tingling spice. 

What has been buried flies outward 

startling crows and fragmenting clouds, 

tickling every sea bed and pillow,

waking all giants from the adventures of their underground slumbers.

Mountains move.

I smear blood and mud across her skins, howling and stamping, 

churning up my big noise with big movements. 

Marking time with arcs and taking up more space.

Being bigger than my skin. 

Meeting my edges and stomping out beyond them 

with a wild glee that asks for nothing in response,

no acceptance 

no apology or accompanying explanation. 

The world breathes me in.

Hello you glorious fierce fucker. 

I’ve been waiting for you.