There is a version of me
that did not think she would make it here.

Not in the dramatic way people tell survival stories,
clean and bright, tied with language that makes sense.

I mean the quieter knowing.
The one that lives in the body.

The way my shoulders still brace
like something is about to happen.
The way my hands remember
before my mind does.

And still—
I am here.

We don’t talk enough about this kind of survival.

Not the kind that gets applause.
The kind that looks like showing up to class or work
when your body feels like it’s full of static.
The kind that looks like learning something new
while carrying everything you’ve ever lived through.

The kind that looks like building a life
while still inside the after.

🌒 On Becoming in Real Time

Something is shifting.

I can feel it in the way I walk into rooms now.
Not fearless—
but less willing to disappear.

I got into college.
More than one.

Transferring from community college—
from a place where I rebuilt something I wasn’t sure I’d ever have again.

Even writing that feels strange, like I’m saying it
about someone else.

There was a time when survival was the only plan.
Now I am making choices.

Not all of them feel easy.
Not all of them feel clear.

But they are mine.

And that feels like a kind of miracle
I am still learning how to hold.

🌕 Where the Voice Is Landing

Something else has been unfolding alongside all of this—

my voice is finding new places to live.

My poem Of Saints and Brujas was published in the 20th anniversary edition of Meat for Tea.
A poem about queer sacredness, about the body as altar, about what survives and still dares to call itself holy.

If you want to hold it in your hands, you can find the issue here:
https://meatfortea.com/buy.htm

There is something surreal about this—
to write from a place that once felt unspeakable,
and then watch it move out into the world,
carried by other people.

And there’s more.

On April 16 at 6pm, I’ll be on the radio—
Poet Talk with Ellen Miller-Mack on WMUA 91.1 at UMass.

Another space where the voice leaves the body
and becomes sound.

And soon—
a series I’ve been working on quietly:

short story, lyrical memoir pieces
that will air on 103.5 WCCH,
the radio station at Holyoke Community College.

Stories rooted in the body.
In silence.
In what it took to stay.

If you’re local, you can also find me in person—
I’ll be reading new work at the Majestic Café open mic in Easthampton, Massachusetts,
a mix of poetry and music, 2nd and 4th Sundays from 11am–2pm.

I used to think finding my voice meant speaking louder.

Now I think it means this—
letting it travel.
letting it change form.
letting it be heard in places I never imagined
I would reach.

🌿 The Body Keeps Its Own Calendar

Spring is supposed to be about renewal.

But my body doesn’t always move that way.
Sometimes it lags behind the season.
Sometimes it resists.

Sometimes it blooms in places no one can see.

Healing, I’m learning,
is not a straight line toward “better.”

It’s a conversation.

Between who I was,
who I am,
who I am becoming.

Some days they speak softly to each other.
Some days they argue.

Some days they refuse to share the same room.

Still—
we are learning how to live together.

🔥 Small Refusals, Small Devotions

Lately, I’ve been practicing something different.

Not grand transformation.
Not reinvention.

Just small refusals.

Refusing to rush my own pace.
Refusing to call my body a problem.
Refusing to disappear to make other people comfortable.

And alongside that—
small devotions.

A meal made with care, even if it’s just for me.
A text sent to someone I love.
A moment of rest without apology.

Nothing flashy.
Nothing that would look impressive from the outside.

But inside—
it is changing everything.

💌 A Line I Keep Returning To

If I love you, it’s already revolution.

I wrote that once thinking about the world.

Now I understand it differently.

What if loving myself—
in all the ways I was taught not to—
is also a form of resistance?

What if choosing myself
is the revolution?

🌙 A Practice for This Moment

Tonight, or whenever you read this—

Place your hand somewhere on your body
that feels neutral.

Not your most wounded place.
Not your most defended place.

Just somewhere you can rest your hand
without flinching.

Stay there for a moment.

Not to fix.
Not to heal.

Just to notice.

You are here.

That is not a small thing.

🌾 Closing

I used to think survival meant getting somewhere else.
A future where everything made sense.
Where the past stopped echoing.

Now I think survival might be this:

Learning how to stay.
Learning how to listen.
Learning how to build something gentle
inside a life that wasn’t.

I am still becoming.

Not finished.
Not resolved.

But here.

And maybe that is enough for now.

With devotion,
Isa Gitana

Ancestor Dinner, Hunger, and the Soft Work of Survival

There are nights when the veil thins — not just between worlds, but between the versions of ourselves we’ve had to become. Nights when the act of setting a table feels less like a tradition and more like a reckoning: with memory, with hunger, with the people who raised us or failed us or left before we were ready.

This month, our household held an ancestor dinner.
It wasn’t elaborate.
It wasn’t curated for photographs.
It was honest.

And I think that’s what I’m learning: sometimes honesty is the most sacred thing we can bring into a room.

🌽 The Table, the Hunger, the History

I keep thinking about how ancestor rituals are often imagined — long tables, full plates, vibrant offerings. I didn’t grow up with those scenes. My family knew hunger more intimately than abundance. We learned early how to stretch food, how to ration groceries, how to pretend we weren’t still hungry after the pot was scraped clean.

So when we set the table for our ancestors this year, I felt a quiet ache beneath the ritual — a recognition that honoring them also means acknowledging what we lived through, what they lived through, and what still follows us.

Food insecurity isn’t an abstract issue for me; it’s woven into my childhood, my early adulthood, the years I spent raising my daughter alone, the months when groceries were a balancing act of math and worry.

Even now, with SNAP cuts looming again, the familiar anxiety returns — in those tiny, persistent calculations:
how many meals can this stretch?
what can I freeze?
what can I skip?
what can I make last?

I don’t write this for pity; I write it because I’m not alone. So many of us are quietly navigating the same terrain, ashamed to name it, taught to survive it without complaint.

But this time, instead of swallowing the story, I’m placing it on the table.

🍽️ What We Offered, What Offered Itself Back

Our ancestor dinner wasn’t a feast. It didn’t have to be.
We cooked what we had.
We lit a candle.
We made space at the table, even if that space looked small.

There was a moment — quiet, easy to miss — when I felt the room steady. Like something old and familiar pulled up a chair. Not the cinematic version of ancestor presence, but the gentle kind: memory through smell, grief softened by laughter, a sudden urge to name aloud the people we’ve lost or longed for or never met but carry anyway.

We talked about family stories, some of them heavy, some of them hilarious. We talked about the people who taught us to survive, even when they didn’t always know how to love us well. We talked about the relatives who cooked without recipes, who fed whole households with whatever they could afford that week, who kept traditions alive through touch and instinct rather than ceremony.

And something unexpected happened:
eating became remembering,
and remembering became connection.

Not just to the dead — but to each other.

🕯️ The Tenderness of Enough

I’ve been thinking a lot about enough.
How slippery it feels.
How political it is to need more.
How vulnerable it is to admit lack.

In a world obsessed with abundance, enough feels almost radical.

We didn’t have an overflowing table. We had a real one.
We didn’t serve ten dishes. We served what we could.
We didn’t offer extravagance. We offered presence.

And somehow, in the soft hum of that evening, the room felt full in a way that had nothing to do with portions or ingredients.

It made me wonder if enough has always been less about quantity and more about honesty — the raw, unfiltered truth of showing up exactly as we are, without pretending we’ve never known hunger.

Sometimes enough is just having someone to eat with.
Sometimes it’s lighting a candle for the people who walked you this far.
Sometimes it’s feeding the living while remembering the dead.
Sometimes it’s holding onto hope that next month will be easier.

Sometimes enough is admitting the quiet fear you carry — and finding out the people around you carry it too.

💌 Excerpt from my poem, Of Hunger

I learned hunger early—
how it waits in the walls,
how it names you
before you name yourself.

Even now,
I feel my stomach tighten
when someone says there’s plenty,
as if my body still remembers
the years we lived on almost nothing.

But every time I fill a bowl
to the rim,
every time I feed someone I love,
I break a small inheritance.

— Isa Gitana

✍🏽 A Prompt for Your Own Ancestor Table

Write for five minutes — no editing, no second-guessing:

Who fed you when the world wouldn’t?
Blood family, chosen family, queer family, a neighbor, a friend, a version of yourself you thought was gone — write them into the room.

If you feel brave, reply to this email with their name. I’ll light a candle for them when I sit down to write next month’s letter.

🥣 If You Need Food Support Right Now (Western MA Resources)

Because talking about hunger means talking about care — real, tangible care.
Here are local places offering free groceries, meals, and support across Western Massachusetts:

Northampton Survival Center

265 Prospect St, Northampton, MA
A longstanding community hub offering groceries, fresh produce, and family support.
Website: northamptonsurvival.org

Open Pantry Community Services

2460 Main St, Springfield, MA
Emergency food pantry, mobile food programs, and community meals.
Website: openpantry.org

Margaret’s Pantry (Providence Ministries)

56 Cabot St, Holyoke, MA
A welcoming pantry serving Holyoke and surrounding towns.
Website: provministries.org

Parish Cupboard

1023 Main St, West Springfield, MA
Provides groceries and hot meals to anyone who needs them.
Website: parishcupboard.org

Westfield Food Pantry

101 Meadow St #1, Westfield, MA
Groceries and community food assistance for Westfield and nearby towns.
Website: westfieldfoodpantry.org

Easthampton Community Center

12 Clark Street, Easthampton, MA
Offers grocery distributions, a community meals program, clothing support, and more — serving residents of the greater Easthampton area.
Contact phone: (413) 527-5240
Website: easthamptoncommunitycenter.org

🗺️ Find a Pantry Anywhere in Western Mass

The Food Bank of Western Massachusetts keeps an updated, searchable map of food pantries, meal sites, and mobile food distributions:
🔗 foodbankwma.org/get-help/food-finder The Food Bank of Western Massachusetts

Food Assistance Across the U.S.

If you’re outside Western MA, this national directory can help you find local pantries anywhere in the country:
🔗 https://www.feedingamerica.org/find-your-local-foodbank

🛒 If You’re Able to Give: What Food Pantries Actually Need

And because hunger is both personal and political, I want to offer something practical too — a small list of what food pantries actually need, in case this month you have a little extra to give. Hunger doesn’t wait for November or December, and our care shouldn’t either; food pantries are overwhelmed in summer, in spring, in every month that isn’t wrapped in holiday charity.

Staple Foods (Always Needed)

• Rice

• Pasta

• Canned beans (black, pinto, chickpeas, kidney)

• Canned vegetables + fruit

• Peanut butter or nut butters

• Shelf-stable milk (oat, almond, boxed dairy)

• Cooking oil

• Canned tuna, chicken, or sardines

• Soups and stews

• Boxed cereal and oats

Protein (high-value donations)

• Canned meats and fish

• Peanut butter

• Shelf-stable tofu

• Beans (canned or dry)

• Lentils

Culturally relevant foods

(These are often overlooked but deeply appreciated.)

• Masa harina

• Goya products

• Rice noodles

• Curry pastes

• Plantain products

• Spices (cumin, chili, turmeric, garlic, etc.)

• Coconut milk

• Shelf-stable tortillas

Personal + Household Essentials

(Food stamps don’t cover these.)

• Toilet paper

• Menstrual products

• Soap / body wash

• Toothpaste + toothbrushes

• Laundry detergent

• Dish soap

• Diapers + wipes

Extra-Helpful Items

• Gluten-free or allergen-friendly foods

• Baby formula

• Shelf-stable snacks for kids

• Instant coffee or tea

• Reusable grocery bags

What NOT to donate

• Open or expired food

• Homemade foods

• Items in glass jars (many sites can’t accept them)

• Random “cupboard clean-outs” nobody will use

Most important of all:

Give what people actually eat.
Give what you would want in your own kitchen.
Dignity matters as much as the food itself.

💬 Closing

This ancestor dinner reminded me that survival is communal.
That hunger doesn’t only live in the stomach — it lives in memory.
That sometimes the bravest thing we can do is say, aloud, “I’ve known scarcity,” and let someone else nod in recognition.

May this month bring you moments of enough —
enough food, enough rest, enough softness, enough honesty to share what’s real without shrinking.

May your table hold laughter.
May your kitchen hold warmth.
May your people — living and dead — know they’re welcome.

With tenderness,
Isa Gitana

There’s a kind of love that doesn’t need a name.
It hums in the space between people — the friend who remembers to text when you disappear, the neighbor who leaves food on your porch, the lover who holds your face like a prayer, the ancestor who hums through your hands when you stir a pot of something warm.

This is the love I want to write about — the one that isn’t confined by labels or blood. The love that doesn’t perform. The love that chooses you anyway.

October, with its thinning light and long shadows, always brings me back to the tender truth that everything we touch is temporary. The trees let go. The sky changes color. The air carries both sweetness and decay. And still — we love.

We keep loving.
Not because it’s easy, but because it’s holy.

The Practice of Tending

When I say love as ritual, I mean this:
every act of care is spellwork.

It’s the meal cooked for someone too tired to cook.
The way we hold silence for a friend who can’t speak yet.
The late-night laughter that cracks open a hard day.
The shared playlist, the morning coffee, the small note tucked under a door.

Love lives in those moments.
It doesn’t have to be romantic to be transformative.
It doesn’t have to be lifelong to be sacred.

Sometimes the deepest intimacy is in the pause — the way two people share breath in a conversation that changes nothing and everything.

Sometimes love is holding space, not holding on.

🌙 On the Middle of Things

Years of loving — lovers, friends, family, community — and I’ve learned that relationships aren’t linear. They’re circular, spiral, tidal. Some come back again and again, changed but still familiar.

This month marked nine years since I met my partner. We didn’t know that night by the bonfire at the orchard how much life we’d weather together — or how many shapes love would take between us. There have been seasons of fire and seasons of silence, laughter that opened us, tenderness that stitched us back together. We’ve learned that love isn’t a fixed state; it’s an organism that keeps evolving, asking us to grow softer, braver, more honest with one another.

But love has other constellations, too.
My daughter — now grown, with her own stories and edges — teaches me what it means to love without possession. We are learning each other as adults: two people who care deeply, who choose to stay connected not out of duty, but because affection keeps finding new language between us. It’s humbling and beautiful — to witness her becoming, and to be allowed to change alongside her.

And then there’s the circle of friends, the chosen kin, the people who keep showing up through every version of me. The ones who leave soup, send poems, make me laugh when I forget how. The ones who remind me that love doesn’t have to look the same to be real.

Every relationship in my life — romantic, familial, communal — has taught me another dialect of devotion. Another way to say I’m here.

Maybe that’s the quiet miracle of the middle: learning to hold love loosely enough that it can keep breathing. Knowing that it will change, and trusting that what matters will return, transformed but still true.

💌 Excerpt from my poem, If I Love You, It’s Already Revolution

If I love you,
I will fight the empire in your name
and let it think
I’m only making breakfast.
We will carve tenderness
into the cracks of this world
until even the silence
starts echoing our names.

-Isa Gitana

🌻 Community Ritual in Real Time

Speaking of ritual — I’ll be sharing some new poems live this month.

For local folks, I’ll be at the Marigold Café Open Mic in Easthampton — a cozy mix of poetry, short stories, and live music — on Sunday, October 12, and again on Sunday, October 26, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

If you’re nearby, come say hi, share a piece, or just soak in the magic. It’s one of my favorite spaces — full of caffeine, community, and that good kind of creative electricity that lingers long after you leave.

🔥 A Ritual for Communal Love

Tonight, light a candle for all the forms love takes in your life.
Whisper the names of your people — the ones who hold you, the ones you hold, the ones you’ve lost but still feel.

If you’re alone, know you’re still part of the circle.
If you’re together, make space for the quiet.
If you’ve been hurt by love, may this be the month that begins your healing.

Write one act of care you’ll offer the world this week.
Something small. Something real.
Then do it.

That, too, is love.

🌾 Closing

I no longer believe love has to look one way.
It can be the friend who sits with you in silence.
The lover who makes you laugh until you cry.
The chosen family who shows up with casseroles and chaos.
The stranger who sees you and nods.

All of it is holy.
All of it is worth tending.

So this October, may we remember:
love isn’t a possession — it’s a practice.
It doesn’t ask for perfection, only participation.
It begins again every time we reach out our hands and say, I see you. Stay awhile.

May your days be full of small revolutions.
May you keep building your altar of care —
one kind gesture, one honest word, one heartbeat at a time.

With devotion,
Isa Gitana

The world is heavy right now. You feel it too — the weight pressing in at the edges of every day. In times like these, creativity is not luxury; it is survival. The poem, the painting, the song hummed under your breath — each is a small defiance, each a way of saying: we are still here, still making beauty against all odds.

Summer is always my season. The warmth, the endless light, the way days stretch wide and generous. But autumn is here, and with it comes a harder turning. I’ve always struggled with this shift: the dimming sun, the cooling air, the reminder that everything changes whether we are ready or not. Still, the work is to carry summer’s radiance inside us — to bank it like embers that will last through the darker months.

This past week I had the honor of performing with Echoes of Nature: Hampshire County, alongside Kim Bahoff and Jess Martin as The Echoes of Community, with so many beautiful voices filling the space. You can catch a short clip on my Instagram if you’d like a glimpse. https://www.instagram.com/xingonafemme/

And — if you’re local — I’d love to see you at Poetry in the Park this month:

🍎 Poetry in the Park
📅 Thursday, Sept 18 | ⏰ 5–7 PM
📍 Park Hill Orchard, Easthampton, MA
🎤 Open mic 5–5:40 PM • Featured readers 5:45 PM
☔ Rain date: Sept 19
Organized by Easthampton Poet Laureate Carolyn Zaikowski

Bring a blanket, bring a friend, bring your own open heart to the orchard’s shifting light.

A Small Spell for Poetry Readers and Listeners

Before you step to the mic, pause. Touch the words in your mouth like seeds in your palm. Breathe once for your ancestors, once for yourself, once for those who will hear you. Let the wind carry what you release. Let the earth hold what you cannot. Speak as though every apple on the tree is listening, as though silence itself is leaning forward. When you finish, leave the echo behind you — it will know where to land.

From Of Breathing Through Smoke

Some nights I hold the sun in my chest
like a coal I refuse to let go cold.
I breathe it forward, ember by ember,
through the hours that try to unmake me.
Even in darkness, the light insists—
a quiet pulse, a stubborn flame.

Isa Gitana

🌙 That’s the September offering: reflection, invitation, spell, and a fragment of poem to carry into the season’s turning.

I’ve been writing about the ways grief teaches rhythm, the ways it makes you loosen your grip — not because you’re ready, but because the tide insists.

From Of Tides and Letting Go:

No one tells you the cost
of belonging nowhere—
and everywhere—
all at once.
That trauma makes a country of you,
then leaves you borderless.
You become the ocean’s child—
claimed by nothing,
returned by everything.

Those lines have been sitting in my chest lately.
It’s for anyone who’s had to build a life out of what washed back ashore.
For anyone who has learned that belonging isn’t always a place — sometimes it’s just the knowing that you keep coming back to yourself.

When I don’t know where to put the weight of my own story, I return to water.
To the sound of it.
To the pull of it.
To the part of me that still believes the sea recognizes her own.

A spell for the ones who don’t settle

Take a cup of sea water — or the saltiest tears you’ve ever cried.
Stand facing the wind.
Whisper the name of the thing you will not chase.
Bury the cup in the sand.
Leave your palms open to the tide.
Walk away without looking back.

It will find you when it’s ready.

Tell me — when you think of home, does it feel like a place, a person, or something else entirely?
Hit reply. I’d love to know what the tide has returned to you.

In rage, in love, in survival,
—Isa

Content warning: The featured poem includes themes of dissociation and trauma.

I want to share Of the Space Between, a poem that lives in the quiet crack between harm and healing. It’s a piece about dissociation, frozen moments, and the questions we ask when language fails. It’s one of the rawest pieces I’ve written lately, and I hope it speaks to anyone who’s ever felt themselves suspended in silence.

Poem: Of the Space Between

There is a name
for the moment after harm—
but before the scream.

I lived there.
For years, maybe.
I don't remember.

The body
       goes quiet
not like sleep—
like waiting.
Like an animal
pressed flat
under threat.

Still.
So still
I forgot how to come back.

I counted
cracks in the ceiling.
Blinds slitting the light.
The hum of the fridge.
The hum in my head.

I left without leaving.
Stayed without staying.

They say
      freeze
is a kind of survival.
That the body saves you
by forgetting
what it is.

My hands were
       someone else’s.
My mouth
       was a locked room.
My eyes stayed open.
I saw nothing.

Sometimes I think
     this is where
healing begins—
     in the stalling.
The in-between.
The still-not-safe.

This is the space
     no one talks
        about.

Not the wound.
Not the scar.
Just
   the static.
   the airless wait.
   the cold
      before the name.
   the sound
      almost forming
      but never finding
        a mouth.

I opened my mouth
       to speak.
But the air
         pulled back.
Like it knew
what I was about to—

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how easily we’re taught to accept the unacceptable. About the rage that simmers when we’re told to stay quiet. And about how poetry can name what systems try to bury. These past weeks, I’ve been sickened by the violence that continues unchecked in Gaza, the erosion of bodily autonomy closer to home, and the quiet normalization of fascism’s edges in our daily lives. It can feel impossible to hold it all, but I believe poetry can be both a salve and a sword. This month, I’m rooting for every voice that refuses to be quieted. I invite you to keep writing, making, resisting—even if your voice shakes.

I’ve also been deep in the bones of Body as Altar, shaping poems that burn, weep, and whisper. This past month, I finalized several pieces for the Water and Ancestors sections and began weaving connective threads across the whole collection. The poem I’m sharing here, Of the Space Between, is an early glimpse from the Air section—a small window into the manuscript’s heart. Thank you for being here—your presence makes this work feel possible.

If you’re local, I’d love to see you in person this July! I’ll be at the open mic at Tangle in Williamsburg, MA on Friday, July 11 at 6:30pm, and at Marigold Café in Easthampton, MA from 11am–2pm on both Sunday 7/13 and 7/27. Come say hi, bring your poems, music, or just soak in the magic of people gathering to share what’s on their hearts.

I’ve also been dreaming up something tactile—something to bring poems off the screen and into your hands. I’m so excited to share the seed of this idea with you:

The Inked Bruja
Monthly poems and spells, straight from my altar to your mailbox

The Inked Bruja is a monthly ritual of words sent by mail—each envelope contains a printed poem, a small spell, or a handwritten note, crafted to offer resistance, tenderness, and magic in a world that tries to silence us. Every piece is made to be held, displayed, or gifted, because sometimes, the right words at the right time can be a charm strong enough to keep going.

What do you think? Would you subscribe? Does the idea of a small talismanic poem arriving in your mailbox each month call to you? Hit reply and let me know—I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Here’s a small resistance spell for July, for anyone feeling worn down by injustice:

Spell for Standing Firm
Take a stone small enough to hold. Whisper your fiercest truth into it. Carry it in your pocket when the world tries to shrink you. Let it remind you: you have weight, you have presence, you do not owe your silence.

Your presence here means the world. If you’d like to support my work, you can share this newsletter with a friend or send a tip through Venmo.

May July bring you breath when you need it most, fierce tenderness in the face of despair, and words that remind you how alive you are.

Yours in poetry and resistance,

Isa Gitana

The birds we folded at the Salem Poetry Festival are still flying through me.

That weekend felt like stepping into a circle—poets speaking grief like prayer, rage like ritual, memory like a muscle. I sat in rooms scented with incense and revolution, where saints wore lipstick and protest signs, where Palestinian poetry turned paper into wings, and someone said: don’t write the trauma until you’re ready.
Then someone else said: but what if the writing is how we survive it?

I’ve done both.

I wrote the night my father died. I don’t know if it was poem or prayer or journal entry. I only know it helped. Maybe for me, the “space” isn’t in time, but in how the language holds me. Maybe poetry is the space.

This summer, I’m writing my first full-length poetry manuscript.
It’s called Body as Altar: Poems from the Book of Elements.

It’s a book built from what I carry—salt, bone, rage, tenderness, memory.
It’s divided into five elemental sections: Earth, Fire, Water, Air, Ancestors.
Each one is a threshold. Each one is a spell.
I’m writing it as a queer, mixed-race, poet in the in-between space of grief and becoming.

Here is your first glimpse—one line or two from each element:

🌿 EARTH
from “Of Cooking as Spellwork”

She cursed in two languages
while the sauce thickened
and the house held its breath.

🔥 FIRE
from “Of Saints and Brujas”

Because every time they tried to burn us,
we fed the flames our old names—
and rose.

🌊 WATER
from “Of Touch”

We cried into each other’s necks.
We made water from dust.

🌬️ AIR
from “Of Silence”

I was going to tell you—
but the words
              disappeared
before they reached my mouth.
Not out of fear.
       Not exactly.
Just the way a wound learns
to close around the weapon.

🕯️ ANCESTORS
from “Of the Dead Who Still Tend Me”

They whisper directions in the language of ache—
a crow’s cry at the right turn,
a stone in my shoe when I’m veering off.
They don’t guide;
they haunt me forward,
naming me with every step
until I remember
I already know the way.

A small spell for June:

Breathe in the memory.
Breathe out the silence.
Write what you were never given permission to say.
Let it live.
Let it light something.

This is the work.
This is the offering.
This is the book I’m building with ash under my nails and salt on my tongue.

If it speaks to you, stay close. Share it with someone who writes in the dark, too.
And if you’ve been folding your grief into birds lately—I’d love to know what they carried.

With breath, ember, and ink,
Isa Gitana

Subscribe now

Dear one,

I’ve been meaning to write to you.

Not just today, not just because it’s May and the light is doing strange, beautiful things against my windows—but because I’ve been carrying this for a while: the knowing that it’s time to speak more openly, more regularly, from the part of me that still believes poetry can be spellwork, lifeline, mirror, ritual, refusal.

So hello.
My name is Isa Gitana, and I am a queer, mixed-race poet and bruja. My work lives at the altar between grief and survival, between the kitchen and the spirit realm, between what I’ve inherited and what I’m still becoming. I write with my whole body—through loss, through rage, through the soft magic of memory.

You might know me from the live reading when poet laureate of Easthampton, MA Carolyn Cushing passed the torch to the new poet laureate Carolyn Zaikowski, from zines passed hand to hand, the work I do in community with Survivor Arts Collective, or maybe from the way grief smells when it’s mixed with vanilla and salt. However you got here—I’m glad you’re here.

Why now?

Because too many of us are carrying words we’ve never had a safe place to say.
Because spring is a lie and a reckoning—nothing blooms without breaking first. Because we are still creating in a world on fire, and that, too, is a form of survival.
Because I want to stop whispering into the void and start writing into community.

The community I’m calling in

This space is for the survivors, the brujas, the ones who hear their ancestors in the wind.
For my queer and trans loves, for those who’ve known silence intimately, for those who create anyway.
This is not a poetry newsletter that will teach you craft. This is not a brand.

This is a place to gather. To remember. To spill.
To be held by language when nothing else is holding.

Each month, I’ll send you a small offering:
a reflection, a few lines I’ve been carrying, a poem-spell that might speak to what’s rising in your own chest.
Sometimes there’ll be audio. Sometimes something old.
Sometimes something still bleeding.

Always true. Always from the marrow.

A small spell for May

Take one deep breath
for every name you carry.
Salt the doorway,
light the match.

May the ghosts who tend you
walk with you soft.
May your rage find shape
that doesn’t burn you.
May what you have lost
return in other ways—
a crow’s call,
a hand on your back,
a line you can’t stop writing down.

This month’s poem:

Of Saints and Brujas

We were not baptized in water. We were anointed in blood and fire, in the names of the women who disappeared and the ones who refused to. Our communion was made of bitter herbs and spit; we took it kneeling in kitchens, surrounded by smoke and the sharp scent of garlic on our hands. We drank from chipped mugs, passed down through mothers who kneaded hexes into dough, baked revenge into every crust and carved warnings into the soft underbellies of prayer.

The saints we worshipped did not glow in stained glass. They wept in bathrooms, blessed their lovers with with fingers wet from their own holy cum. Their altars were cluttered—half-burned candles, broken rosaries, love letters never sent, bones dug up from the garden. Their incense was clove and weed and the scent of a body unwashed from grief. They kissed women and men and everyone in between with the same holy hunger, and they never asked forgiveness.

We were raised on stories the Church forgot: of La Llorona wailing not in madness but protest, of Eve taking the apple on purpose, of angels who looked like us and never touched the ground. Our catechism came from grandmothers who stirred spells into stew and traced crosses over doorways with ashes from their own hair. We carry those ashes still.

Call us heretics. We are. We kissed girls in confessionals. We said our amens with teeth. We licked the wounds clean and whispered get up to the broken. We buried our dead with coins on their eyes and protection sigils on their soles. The priests wouldn’t touch us, so we crowned each other—queens of salt, of blood, of shadow, of survival. Crowned with grief, crowned with glitter, crowned with the names no one dared speak aloud.

We do not fear hell. Hell fears us.

Because we come from brujas who wrote psalms in slick and honey, saints who carved their stories into bone. Because we love like resurrection and rage like revelation. Because every time they tried to burn us, we fed the flames our old names—and rose.

-Isa Gitana

Thank you for meeting me here.
If this offering speaks to you, share it with someone who might need a little light in the dark.
If you’re new—welcome to the hearth.
There’s always a cup waiting, still warm.

With salt, smoke, and love,
Isa Gitana

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