Phoenix Robles

Documented Emotional Expression

[metamorphesque]

― Salma Deera, Letters From Medea

[text ID: The centre of every poem is this: / I have loved you. / I have had to deal with that.]

[phoenixrobles]

Excerpts: Parents

"THE DICHOTOMY OF DADDY'S LOVE"

If the pain that resided within my mother was expelled, at times, in the most heinous and borderline lethal acts of physical abuse, my father's pain was being expelled in the most mentally tactical way possible. His mental games and punishment were occasionally infused with a lot of verbal abuse in the form of intellectual depreciation, and sometimes add a sprinkle of physical abuse to drive home his message of disdain for stupidity and mistakes.

The verbal abuse was enough to make the devil recoil in disbelief, and yet his daughter, the one he often proclaimed "I prayed to have you, to have a daughter", was the recipient of the most damaging words a parent could say to a child. I almost preferred it. The quick and unsuspected strikes rooted in my mother's rage within her discipline; the physical pain would go away eventually. But the words often left me questioning how I saw myself, do I trust the words of my father because he is my parent? Or do I trust the way I see myself which was completely different than what he said I was? A child always trusts their parents no matter what...

Verbal abuse left lingering scars of disdain. Forever the daughter who sought daddy's approval.

[surqrised]

“Go and love someone exactly as they are. then, watch how they transform into the greatest truest version of themselves. when one feels seen and appreciated in their own essence, one is instantly empowered.”

— Wes Angelozzi

[twixnmix]

Prince photographed by Robert Whitman, 1977.

[phoenixrobles]

INTIMACY

•intimacy• [noun]

close familiarity or friendship; closeness

Something of a personal or private nature

It is my belief that on this journey through life the Universe often presents us with an opportunity to redefine beliefs and ideas we maybe once had drawn a very concrete definition for. These ideas must be reconsidered for the purpose of growth and maturation.

Personally, I am never too fixed on an idea, or particular theory as I believe most things are fluid in their ability to be redefined or change. However, like many people, I suffer from the human urge to become complacent within my behavior pertaining to ideas and concepts that suit my current self. As the applied action of intimacy was no longer serving my current self, I was suddenly traversing through yet another existential crisis which was now assisting with a new cycle of growth and maturation it was time for me to adjust to.

Within this generation, we have seemingly managed to take sacred action such as intimacy between two or more people, and trivialize it to only be applied to romantic or sexual intimacy. Doing so neglects the beauty of intimacy required to sustain relationships with our close family and friends. For reasons only a licensed mental health practitioner is qualified to handle, my frustration with the current state of intimacy within my sexual and romantic relationships currently made me cringe from the lack thereof. I often incorporate the help of my spirituality to assist in this processing of emotions when going through an existential crisis of such depth. This time the need to manifest more attention to my personal relationships was requested; I believe I needed to be more appreciative of said relationships and moreover how to be better at sustaining these intimate relationships.

As with most things within my path of growth this request of attentiveness to personal intimacy has been presenting itself to me throughout the month of May. After a period of deep introspection and silent observation, I welcomed the May Day event as a moment to experience the sweetness of closeness within my community.

For quite some time I had been brooding- particularly in response to the betrayal and abuse I had experienced with those with whom I thought were my community members aiming for similar objectives. It had been quite some time since I felt safe and comfortable in the same group that I had shared activism space with. During this time I was realizing I was feeling a similar feeling pertaining to my romantic relationships; again things that a licensed mental health practitioner is certified to handle.

As usual, along with my photojournalism images of the May Day event, I took the opportunity to capture some B-Sides of the day's activities.

•I N T I M A C Y•

I looked around in the circle of people that occupied a corner of the lawn within Maria Hernandez Park, people I had only known for a little over 2 years, and yet many of whom I have shared many close and deeply private moments collectively and individually. It was in that moment that the idea of restructuring this idea of intimacy presented itself; the whole moment within itself was deeply intimate. JP a comrade and fellow photojournalist arrived and the electricity of shared intimacy grew as someone we all loved deeply surprised us after being away for so long. Something in that moment was like a bolt of lightning hitting me as a reminder that I have been surrounded by the intimacy of my community this whole time.

Although the conclusion to this path I'm walking within this shift in the idea of intimacy hasn't yet presented itself. I look into my archives of B-Sides and remember I have been documenting the art of intimacy this whole time.

[phoenixrobles]

March On Washington 2020- A Photo Essay

Around this time a year ago, I was preparing for my return from Washington D.C. back to New York, with me, I was bringing back so many emotions and thoughts about the scenes that seemed to be on constant replay in my mind. My journey to this nation's imposed capital began a few days before what seemed to be millions of people flooding the streets of D.C. to take a unified stand against the continued brutalizing and murdering of Black souls and bodies. National Action Network led by #revalsharpton made a call for our Black nation to join together on the anniversary of one of the most historic moments in Black history, and it only seemed fitting that we answered the call during the current climate of universal civil unrest.

The days before, I spent with assisting community members of Washington D.C. in attending to the un-housed community which plagues the current history of Washington D.C.; a result of decades of red-lining which has become the extreme- gentrification. This action paired with other traditional acts of systemic oppression has left a residue of abuse to the very generations of people who helped make "Chocolate City" a landing point of national pride. Within the process of connecting with the community, there was a beauty in the love that was being spread. But there were still moments in which I looked around and couldn't help but feel the heaviness of the isolation and pain that is a result of being dismissed within this society. Anger even bubbled within me as I took stock of the many men and women who served this country left without any reward for the life that they traded for presumed protection.

Evenings were a bit different- often in these moments, my intent is to go out only to cover individual stories that are floating within this mass gathering. But clashes between Black people, police, and Trump/Proud Boys were scattered. To only stand back and watch these violent surges occur would be antithetical to the very principles I stand on in terms of always supporting my people.

Strolling down streets, with walls lined the outer rim of the white house, became the outdoor gallery of the people. Signs and art expressing their pains, fears, hatred, hopefulness, and dreams filled the boarded-up parameters. My heart ached each time I found a sign by a child coloring a world that loves one another, or a sign from an elder whose cries of liberty once floated through those very streets, singing songs of liberation and justice, now lamenting of disappointment and frustration. Shortly after, late into the evening when the streets have emptied, I cloak myself to blend in with the night and join in with radicalized community members who would take to the streets to stand against police brutality, demand answers, and be violently met in clashes with the police. The details of these stories will not be told in the national news or publicly unless you were there to witness them firsthand. That early morning I would go back to my hotel room and sit for hours in silence, awaiting the day in confusion.

On the day of the actual march on Washington, I found myself being able to find some joy and elation for what was awaiting me in the day filled with events. I couldn't help but feel as though I was about to attend a national family reunion, and the energy was electric flowing through my body. Upon my arrival at the Lincoln Memorial, the sea filled with shades of brown came in like waves from all across the world. Generations of Blackness filled the same grounds in which many of our own elders and ancestors once came, demanding the same justices and civil liberties. As beautiful as this moment was, I could help but think "HOW DID WE GET HERE AGAIN?". I saw a great grandmother,3 generations of family members, powerful and beauty rose from this living legacy, I listened to her tell her grandbabies about her presence and experience as a young woman listening to Senator John Henry speak and how it fueled her desire to commit her life to her people, a trait that seemed to be passed down to her lineage. I wondered if within her pride, did she too feel a bit defeated and anger by the cycle in which we seemed to be enduring.

Mothers who were daughters of BPP members now with their own daughters, standing against brutality from the system. Yes as beautiful as this moment was, wounds were being reopened and we were silently hemorrhaging in hurt. A disposition Black people have learned to manage all too well. The beautiful memories of love, connection, and pride will always live with me. For D.C. added to my desire to stay committed to the cause of Liberation FOR ALL BLACK BODIES. There were life life-changing changing opportunities to learn to heal, teach, and learn- many in which I took advantage of. Although the conflict or reasoning behind this journey still lives in my head, it is the love that sticks with me.

I have held on to these photos for exactly a year, oftentimes feeling a bit overwhelmed by the words that I should attach to these images; it isn't enough to just tell you of this experience for so many of us, these moments were more than just historic, they were life-changing.

Thank you D.C.

With Radical Love,

Phoenix

[phoenixrobles]

B A L A N C E

is knowing how to be equal parts of peace & solitude as well as fire and brimstone.

[phoenixrobles]

I Wonder While I Wander: Untitled Camden Project

My wanderlust led me to a place that seemed so familiar, I had been here before, figuratively speaking. A place where people go when they may have neared what seemed to be the end of their rope and simply seeking to find someplace to be out of the way. Camden- often reminds me of the depression that anti-blackness of AmeriKKKa causes.

The initial days of my occupying space in Camden led me to some unjust interpretations of this city. It was received as a place that represented how I felt moment in a life. Fresh out of Hudson County Jail after a week long but hard, cold, and spiritually challenging and defining stay, I felt what seemed to be deep and unrelenting gloominess and as if the rest of an unnecessary me was being torn apart. Times I visited Camden I often stayed in a little blue house on a block that seemed isolated from the rest of active civilization and next to and abandoned building with trash strewn around...that seemed to be most of what Camden looked like.

Since my initial arrival on the east coast I was often warned Camden was not a town that was even worth my inquisition let alone a visit. Situated comfortably across the Delaware River from Philadelphia another city that was representative of AmeriKKKan anti-black sentiment, Camden manages to leave residual memories of Urban Americana. A time when Black dreamers seeking liberation from Jim Crow South's vice grip of pain and death, Camden became one of the many landing points of the Great Black Migration.

Fast-forward to the Camden of modern times. In 2019 INSIDER MAGAZINE listed Camden as #8 on it's list of " 50 Most Miserable Cities in the World". With a population of 74,000 residents, whose median income is under $30k, Camden has been tossed away by the government and slapped with the reputation of high-crime rates, high substance abuse rates, high unemployment rates, and a deteriorating life.

The idea of Camden reminding me of other cities that once seemed so promising for the improvement in the quality of life for Black Americans that have now turned into forgotten war zones, like Detroit and Gary, and yet I am somehow intrigued by the willpower of this city.

There is so much to unpack visually, so I have decide to begin digging to find the gems in Camden the rest of the world doesn't often have the privy of seeing. As I walk down streets taking visual stock of this land filled with racial absurdities, I notice that these working class poor, manage to find a smile that is pillowed with a "hello"- signs of the community love that still lives in the southern influenced hospitality that followed grandparents and great grandparents on their journey to this new promised land.

For me that is good enough proof that there is love still residing in a misunderstood land that the rest of the world needs to see.

-Phoenix Robles 2021

[phoenixrobles]

[phoenixrobles]

•I wonder while I wander•

Photo walk short stories: A day full of dummies

I spent the day wandering through the aisles of wig stores, searching for the right wig for a concept I’m toying with. Some of these stores tucked away in overstocked and dusty storefronts and other stores as chic as the street they sell these expressions of beauty.

One thing I always find inspiring and oddly creative are the mannequin heads.

I honestly think it like them better than humans.

Manhattan, NY

1.21.21

[gambinijournal]

Women Rise Up  part2

Gaza border protests. 2018

A woman argues with a riot police during a protest against Chile’s government in Santiago. December 2019.

Saffiyah Khan confronts EDL protester. Birmingham 2017.

The woman from Seoul, South Korea.

The woman from Amazon.

Pakistan gender equality protests.

Ni Una Menos protest.

Chile.

Ecuador, 2019

[killing-the-prophet]

African American flood victims line up to get food and clothing from a Red Cross relief station in front of billboard ironically extolling “WORLD’S HIGHEST STANDARD OF LIVING / THERE’S NO WAY LIKE THE AMERICAN WAY.” Margaret Bourke-White

[phoenixrobles]

MLK DAY POLICE RIOTS

1.18.21

[phoenixrobles]

MLK DAY POLICE RIOT

1.18.21

On a day considered sacred to not only the Black Community but to many American and Wordwide Citizens, NYPD infiltrated a peaceful demonstration commemorating the legacy and life’s work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., with hatred, violence, trans-phobia, and retaliation. 30 peaceful protestors were attacked at City Hall Monday Night, in a melee that left a number of protestors injured, and many wondering what happened.

[phoenixrobles]

“Wait Let Me Fix My Hair”

10.2020

Harlem, NY

Phoenix Robles

[lifeinpoetry]

my greed for love, for my own perfection, reeks of desperation, but it is me and i am holy in my unholiness, so wonderfully messy, that i can’t help but begin to win myself over

— Fariha Róisín, from “self-portraiture,” How to Cure a Ghost

[phoenixrobles]

Reflections

[phoenixrobles]

EX|POSED: Breakthroughs & Rehabilitation, REVELATIONS & REBIRTH

Breakthroughs & Rehabilitation

The beginning of 2020 was a confirmation of what I had been feeling empathetically for months, maybe even years up until that point. There was an energy that allowed me to sense something that was potentially about to be grand scale shift and life changing  within the whole World. No this was no hindsight bias- for weeks I had expressed this feeling which had become second nature to me, this feeling that comfort as we knew it was about to change. An influx of aggression had been bubbling up for quite some time, and there was no place else for this energy to go but to release itself back out.

Each time I went out there was a pressure sitting on my chest getting heavier and heavier, this pressure was the kind that only anxiety can bring. The change I was feeling was going to be an uncomfortable one. As I knew this was a universal shift, I was painfully aware of the revelations and breakthroughs that were approaching in the personal realm of lives.

Within my personal experiences within this shift,  I also knew the time was approaching that I address situations I had neglected  which was no causing extremely uncomfortable limits within my personal life; I call the pass 6 years of my life "Walking in Hysterical Blindness". Recognizing my own response (or lack thereof) to what has felt like a lifetime of neglect and abuse transmuted into precipitous rage and withdrawal, this 0-a million reaction I had generated as a protection mechanism was now prohibiting my ability to move forward. These emotional responses that appeared “negative” doesn’t negate the external afflictions that society has on the person with brown skin and a vagina. But at this point I recognized my inability to avoid this painful death and cycle I had subconsciously committed myself to, lead me to dig myself into a deep lonely hole of pain and isolation for at least 6 years. THIS COULD NOT CONTINUE TO BE MY NARRATIVE: so I chose to allow those calcified pieces of ugly pain begin to fall off of me. I had encountered a breakthrough within my own death.  

While I was about to attend to my proverbial death, the rest of the world seemingly and unknowingly was about to attend to their own. COVID-19 was a physical representation of all the ills of the world coming to surface. Forced to come to terms to the inconceivable ugliness that the worldly society has allowed to fester into a cancer, we were quarantined, a form of rehabilitation within itself, forced to sit with ourselves, our uglies, unable to distract ourselves with the normal escapism we would implement.

Death can be simultaneously painful and beautiful, ugly and comforting. The idea of (re)birth being able to evoke the same emotions is not often considered in a common sense. Beauty often lies within the ability to come to some form of acceptance with yesterday’s occurrences and today’s outcomes, within the  death and rebirth processes. Acceptance allows us to kill off expectations and the parts of ourselves that chose to live in the comfort of lies, and rid ourselves of the parts of us that are not useful for our new found truths. And then there are growing pains of being reborn into the truth and unknown.

I had been running away from my own truths and what I had known was true for so long, settling to fulfill myself on lies because the pain was too much- I was weary and tired.

In my path in this new universal shift and journey, I welcomed the solitude of rebirth. A few months prior to quarantine, I sat on the floor of a women's womb circle as seeds were planted in the soil for that new year. I heard the words say "..seeds have a dark, sometimes cold, and painful journey to get to their breakthrough..you are a seed being planted in the dark growing into your breakthrough.."

REVELATIONS & REBIRTH                                                          

And again, like the rest of the world, tailored along with my breakthrough were revelations that allow me to continue breaking through these calcified conditions we I seemed to be holding on to so tightly.  

As I began to navigate the new pathways of my breaking through old pain, there are revelations that act as stopping points of reflections and truth. One revelation I've come to terms with is that I forgot the essence of myself attempting to force myself into being something I am not for this world who suffers from its own façade.

I had been running from myself for several years at this point; which version I was running from was unclear, maybe all of me (hindsight, it was definitely all of “me”). What was defined and clear is the fact that I was deeply unhappy with me, the life I was living, and had hit my wall of exhaustion and living in my own lies.

The beginning of the COVID epidemic found me in the midst of yet another major transition. Five years of attempting to outrun this person and facade I had created to appease to the acceptance of loved ones, has left me exhausted and depleted. There had been a great rage and resentment that had grown in me, and finally it bubbled up like lava and erupted all over my life.


BURNED! DESTROYED! SCORCHED!

Everything that I had built around this facade of being a happy wife, mother, girlfriend, professional, had fallen apart.  

In fact I wasn’t picture perfect happy with the terms, positioning, and social constructs that went along with having to be the person that fit into these roles.

And in fact these things didn’t actually belong to ME- this person I actually am, and what my essence needs to naturally thrive. But I don’t really know who I am , so this is the new path on this life journey- understanding who this person is and what it is she truly needs. 

Before I begin to traverse this new path, I needed rest. The continuous energy  it takes to keep running in order to survive is devastating when you get the opportunity to stop. It’s like the tailwind finally catching up with you and knocking you down hard.  

Homelessness had approached my threshold and somehow the universe presented an opportunity to reset.

I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize me, and quite honestly I no longer knew who I was: that was the major revelation and theme going into 2020. My rebirth includes reminding myself of all the things that my soul essence loves, writing, music, exploring, solitude, LOVE...for now I know I am being born again, the sun shining through the cracks touching my skin feel familiar and heavenly again, learning to express through words again feels like an escape.