Annotations to Grief After Grief After Grief After Grief by Billy Ray Belcourt
A few thoughts captured for the moment
This is an archived post from Substack from May 14, 2025
Link to the original post: Grief After Grief After Grief After Grief by Billy Ray Belcourt. Billy Ray Belcourt in bold.
1. my body is a stray bullet. i was made from crossfire. love was her last resort. his tongue, a revolver. i come from four hundred no man’s lands.
How fast does a bullet travel? Who marks the line from the barrel to the shattering? Sometimes love sears into flesh to remake your shape. I imagine whether he tastes like metal and fire to you, as I imagine whether she’d taste of unmade worlds to me
2. ‘smell my armpit again / i miss it when you do that.’
The scent of lingering grief is one I once knew
Such memories have been torn by time, and I can’t remember what I once missed
3. his moaning is an honour song i want to world to.
To listen to his moans is to honour the queer joy
Of pleasure severed in its lineage, displaced by
The monstrosity of belonging
The myths of what once was
4. ‘no’ is the only english word you can’t pronounce properly.
Yet even if you could perfect your accent
Yes is all they hear
5. the condition of indigenous life is one of survivor’s guilt.
To perceive the feeling of shame is not the same as shame
To perceive the feeling of fear is not the same as fear
To perceive the feeling of danger is not the same as danger
We as racialized settlers no longer honour the lies that bind
6. it is july 2016 and the creator opens up the sky to attend a #blacklivesmatter protest. there, she bumps into weesageechak and warns him that if policemen don’t stop killing black men she will flood america and it will become a lost country only grieving mothers will know how to find. this, she says, is how the world will end and be rebuilt this time.
In 2025, I greet you at world’s end
Grief reigns over the lines of our faces
We squabble over whose scars run deeper, then kill when we’ve forgotten their shared names—it’s on the tip of our tongues; the police have no answer
But we keep calling them anyway
Meanwhile the ginkgos bloom in foreign lands
Coexisting
7. haunting is a gender. gender is another word for horror story.
They’ll have us forget that gender can be liberation
Closets are full of skeletons that will hurt you in a thousand different ways before devouring you whole, they tell the terrified child as they push them in with the heel of their boot
If the child finds Narnia, the terrors take new form, snatched away to journey alone
We stay sedated in horror stories, reach for violence in ways we’ve only known
Haunting is imagination out of reach
8. ‘i can hear him screaming for me, and i can hear him saying, ‘stop, honey help me.”
There are people in this room who believe that the violence is justified
Unless from Brown and Black bodies
This afternoon, I explained Blue Lives Matter to a friend
There are people in that room, I said, who believe the police can’t be wrong
Only misunderstood by the contours of his bruised fists
There are people in that room who believe the uniform is a sacrifice, and we can’t expect them to be perfect
Even though we never asked them to be perfect—we only asked them to take their boots off
The necks of my friends
9. i am still trying to figure out how to be in the world without wanting it. this, perhaps, is what it means to be native.
I imagine futures where we are free to be still
Dream shapes in our clouds that remind us of the old days
When gardens bloomed
I imagine futures where wanting doesn’t hurt