Warning: Distressing Content

This was my hand injecting the GLP-1 agonist into the right side of my lower stomach every thursday morning there was no blood when the fat has evaporated flesh becomes flesh so take some of my body-stones give to hands starved like a goddess raped every time I leave the house my neighbour watches my fat roll me a pioneer of retaliation piling longed-for pebbles is a side-effect of fascist deafness when approximately three percent of the north of cyprus is owned by israel when it costs the equivalent of a hundred pounds to buy flour in gaza I am sick the day after when the solution has settled inside my island’s tissue concealing the baby whose skullcap was exposed didn’t make it the baby with earrings that spelt love didn’t make it my small intestine didn’t make it watching soft porn colonialism when israel built towers in the village I grew up in planting a back garden of child heads on sticks like my scapulas which protrude prove everything is in control when the domestic home is my belonging site no hard-hat is needed it is easier to talk about fatness when fat becomes a flag that takes my throat hoists me into spurious nationalism why are white people sitting on pavements cat painting when I dream my ribs leave my torso attack me when I sleep the IDF shoot civilians as they arrive at aid distribution centres the centre of me is hard to hide without bulging the eyes of a father holding a baby crisp from another school bombed I’m now too dry to produce a side-effect from self-induced dying my body has been scammed for its muscle a girl uses her feet to drink from her cup my father takes the hinges off the door front while missiles fly over our heads I am now in a calorie deficit my country is a country with chunks bitten from it an oblong slab finished pass the plates a child rots in an incubator.

Artist Statement:

As an artist, I created this poem to live in the rupture—where the personal and political aftermaths collapse into one another. I wanted to write from the body as both a battleground and a witness, where systems of control—medical, colonial, national—leave marks that are not easily erased. The act of injecting a GLP-1 agonist became more than a medical routine; it was a ritual of survival, of performance, of grief, in a world that demands bodily conformity while simultaneously destroying bodies elsewhere.

This piece is born from the intersection of intimate and geopolitical trauma. My fatness, my body, and my homeland are all policed and surveilled in different but overlapping ways. Writing this, I was thinking about the aftermath of empire and occupation, how it continues to shape landscapes, economies, and identities long after the bombs stop falling—or in many places, while they still fall. I’m haunted by images I’ve seen, bodies I’ve known, histories I’ve inherited. The poem becomes a container for all of it.

For me, aftermath is not an ending but a state of being—a kind of haunted threshold between survival and loss. The poem doesn't resolve; it accumulates. It’s a fragmented archive of what remains when the systems fail us, when the news cycle moves on, when the body keeps metabolizing grief. This work is about mourning, yes—but it is also about refusing silence. It is about speaking through the wreckage, even when the language stumbles under the weight of what it’s trying to hold.

N.B. The video displayed here is an excerpt of the full video.