Katrina Bleckley

🚨 This fundraiser is for my G@z *n asylum client Maryam*, her 13 month old baby (born via emergency no-anesthesia c-section in Rafah), and her husband who is being held in immigration detention. He has been locked up since early November, the last time he saw his wife and son. Their families have given their life savings and more to get them out of the g-cide and to California. Now Maryam is a single mother to an infant in a new country facing our immigration courts that are arguing that she should be deported to Israel. She’s already one of my closest friends. I’d be grateful for anything y’all could share with her to rebuild her life here. It’s true that every dollar helps and, if we reach $2k in the next 24 hours, @launchgood will contribute $2k as well. Link in bio! (Campaign by my partner in most things up to but not yet including crime @nasiharamm )

Happy Easter from the household canines who hated every minute of this. And tiny baby Katrina who also hated every minute of that. And small Katrina in plastic pearls.

From Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl. I have been reading it slowly and intentionally, unlike how I usually speed through books. The compassion and empathy I feel for her is all-encompassing, like most borderline feelings, but so is the rage. With every page, I ask myself over and over how my eyes got to be so dead so young. I don’t know if remembering is the curse, or being unable to.

How I feel currently… I’m supposed to leave for Palestine in a week. To join my Signal group of updates, you can join via the QR code in the second photo, DM me your Signal username to add you, or message me on Signal at eggrollforever.60. Yes my “cover story” for going to get through the IOF checkpoint at the border is as a Catholic pilgrim, so that’s the chat as well. Deactivating socials while I’m there, so find me on Signal from 12/17 - 1/26!

This little Papa Obeida fangirl is going to Palestine next month with the International Solidarity Movement. ISM is a Palestinian-led org that provides protective presence to farmers, shepherds, kids going to school, and others who are especially vulnerable to Zionist settler and/or IOF violence. I’ve wanted to volunteer with ISM since I heard about Rachel Corrie, who was martyred by an IOF bulldozer while trying to protect a Gazan house, in 2003. With the escalating need in the West Bank (Gaza is obviously inaccessible) and quitting my job, now is the time. There is nothing that Americans or Europeans can do to make up for what our countries have done to Palestinians, but this is one way to try to stand up to the colonization we are enabling. I still think about Naifa, the elderly Nakba survivor who was martyred by the IOF in Gaza, every day. She has become my compass. I’ll be starting a Signal group to send updates to while I’m in Palestine for at least a month. Let me know if you want me to add you when I make it. Socials will be deactivated while I’m gone for obvious reasons. So sorry to anyone I didn’t get to tell personally. I tried to but lots of stuff crowding my brain these days.

Too much honesty in honor of Suicide Prevention Month: It’s 89° out, but the humidity is sitting pretty at 53%, low for storm season in New Orleans, so it’s not bad. The backyard smells like fresh cut grass — the gardener was just here — and I am sitting beneath the shade of the neighbor’s overgrown tree, on the steps leading up to my rainbow deck. I have been fixated on a dragonfly that is flitting about; flashes of blue-green iridescence sparkle as it flies in and out of the mid-September sun. I have always loved dragonflies. They feel so out of place to me, transports from a fantasy world where there is magic and the lines between good and evil are clearly delineated. Two of my three dogs are sprawled in the yard, photosynthesizing, as my mom says. The third is under the deck digging a hole and his black tail sometimes pops out from beneath the steps. I have a glass of raspberry lemonade with crushed ice. It is a peaceful, lazy afternoon. A gigantic black and yellow butterfly has joined the dragonfly’s flight around the flowers. By all accounts, I should be happy, or at least content. In a parallel universe, I am probably smiling, maybe even laughing. I have been thinking a lot about parallel universes lately, ones where my friends are still my friends, I never made that phone call, or I never ran. But I am not. I feel nothing. I’m not sad or angry or happy or excited or anything. Just…nothing. I have the emotional capacity of the bag of potting soil sagging against the shed, or the neighborhood kids’ punching bag starting to rust in the corner of the yard. I know this is a danger sign for me. A sign that things are getting Bad Again. (1/4)

Grief is omnipresent these days. Yesterday was 10 years since I lost my grandma. There are two people in my life who I have believed when they told me they loved me. She was one, the other is my best friend, a world away in Germany. Grandma was my everything. My only safe space when I was a kid living an incredibly unsafe life. There is nothing in my life that I would not give to have her back and healthy and alive. She had dementia, at the end. The last time I saw her, I had flown back to Massachusetts from Los Angeles for a visit. When I walked in the room, she started screaming because I was a stranger to her and she was so scared. I waited outside until my mom was done. The last birthday card I have from her was signed “love brampri” and I don’t know if she was trying to write “love grandma” or if she just forgot who she was. I visited the house she grew up in in Ireland after she died. I like to think of her there as a young girl, before she immigrated to the United States. Swipe for a photo. It is the place where I felt calmest and I felt that otherworldly sense of “ah here, we are home.” The only Gaelic she ever taught me was how to say “kiss my ass.” She was too ashamed of being Irish to teach me more. My Irish heritage is everything to me. (Continued in comments/swipe through the post)

CW: domestic violence story I was telling my friend about Martina McBride’s song “Independence Day,” and how it used to terrify me as a kid. This is a sketch of an essay, the first thing I’ve written in I cannot tell you how long… It’s strange, the things that you remember and the things that you don’t. I remember the screaming, but never what was said. I can see the faces, but never hear the words. Try as I might, even now, it’s all a silent film. I remember running through the woods, barefoot, my dad chasing me in a towel as I tried to get back to my mom while he showered. I remember the feeling of hidden thorns under my feet with one step and pine needles cushioning my step the next. But I don’t remember how I escaped his house. I remember the police officer asking my mom about her jewelry, other valuables that could be stolen, red and blue lights flashing outside the house. I remember dashing up the three stairs to my bedroom and yelling “my jewelry!” and furiously combing through my jewelry box to make sure it was all there as the adults laughed. But I don’t remember why the police were there. I remember sitting at the top of the stairs, hidden by the hallway wall, knees pulled to my chest, the red and blue lights back at the house. Were they ever not there? I remember my mom crying, delirious with fear, saying “he said ‘call all the cops you want, Eileen, I’ll still kill you all…’” but I don’t remember crawling back into my bed. I remember the knife at my throat, the terror as a trickle of blood ran down, but not why the knife was pulled. The click as the gun was cocked, but not why the trigger wasn’t pulled. I remember the hand, but not whose it was. And I remember the “Independence Day” video. (Swipe through for the whole thing)

Solidarity with all of the protests against Trump’s new Muslim and Black immigrant ban, especially the @cairgla -led one at LAX today. My life in immigration started at LAX after Travel Ban 1.0 came down, when I didn’t even own a suit or know what asylum was (“make sure you have a G-28!” “What the fuck is that?!”) and I wish I could be there with the comrades today. I’ve been thinking of the Iranian grandma who completely changed my life that day very often and I hope her family is together and safe. My heart has been with Los Angeles over the last few days and I’ve never been prouder of of my adoptive home ❤️

The cruelty has been breathtaking and paralyzing and overwhelming. It is becoming almost unbearable. I truly thought I had reached the limit until the murder of Jonathan Joss. I have not been able to stop thinking about him, the barriers he broke as an openly queer indigenous actor, the violence he and his trans partner faced on a daily basis before their house was burned down and their dog was killed and Jonathan sacrificed his life for his husband’s. I think it is the detail that went into the harassment, the violence, and his murder. They made sure he saw his dead dog’s skull and his life burned down before he died. But from the micro to the macro, everything is getting darker and bloodier and more intentional. I am truly losing the ability to process it. The starfish parable doesn’t work anymore (“It mattered to that one.” Swipe for the story if you don’t know it). I’m going to omit details of the micro-micro, the cruelty of friends and family that I have experienced personally. It has come from both expected and unexpected places and I’m having a very hard time not just turning away from everyone I know at this point. Sometimes the violence of words can exceed the violence of action. I’m watching two of the humans I admire most in this world, who have left indelible marks on who I am as a person — someone from my immigration life, another from my music life — go through parallel experiences. Anyone who has ever met me knows I have codependency issues and there isn’t a sword I can fall on or anything I can set on fire or any way to be a shield to make it easier for either of them, to make others see the truth, to silence the whispers. After ten years of therapy and medication, being unable to do anything when someone I love is suffering will still send me into single-minded dysregulation. (Continued in comments bc #feelings) Shirt via @immdef_lawcenter , I wouldn’t be an immigration attorney without them. Plz give them support and dollars and love.

~*~ it’s the most wonderful time of the year ~*~ aka time to break out baby queer Katrina photos for Pride 💜🩶🖤🤍 and remind yall that asexual and aromantic people are part of the LGBTQ+ community!

My friend / client who made me this bracelet just died. Incarcerated by the state and ICE for half his life and, less than a year of freedom later, he’s gone. He led a crochet circle in an immigration detention center. I remember when he finished his first project. A Mr. Potato Head that sits on my desk in New Orleans. I’ve been frozen since I heard the news. An ICE attorney (white woman) told an immigration judge that domestic violence survivors are all liars because they’re so traumatized and he agreed and I cried in court and I don’t know what to say to people who are so terrified of being disappeared. I sit in my office with my client, my friend, who cannot speak about what happened to her unless we are sitting together and she can rest her head on my shoulder and no one looks at her and I hold her and she can whisper. I also don’t know how to help her say this all out loud to a strange judge in a courtroom and maybe that same ICE attorney who will call her a liar. Everyone I love is breaking and fighting and shattering and fighting and screaming and fighting and I wish I could take their breaking and shattering and screaming and carry it for them but I can’t so I just tell them they are beautiful instead. The world watches while the US and the Zio entity burn children alive in Gaza and Yemen and Black children are enslaved in the Congo so we can have iPhones and Black men are enslaved in Louisiana so corporations can profit and indigenous land defenders are slaughtered in the Amazon and Central America and Sudan starves for years on end and the polar bears drown and the bees disappear and the media lies and the government lies and the history books lie and the ones that don’t are banned. We all just did our taxes, which enables these things to continue. If anyone knows what to do with this anger and grief, please let me know. I’m afraid there is no Katrina left outside of the anger and the grief anymore.