Criatura: A Poem by Natasha Thomas — Featuring Photography by Elia Nadie
Sunday Afternoon, Elia Nadie
“Criatura”
In a room full of everyone
you always catch the light.
In a world full of everywhere
my hips will always find you.
Your hands ask questions.
The liquid parts of me answer.
There is no place on Earth my name feels safer than in your mouth.
You walk me to the edge where there is no logic
just intuitive heart,
just instinctive body.
With you, I am more.
A warm-blooded baptism.
A feral flowering.
Criatura.
I don’t want to sing the old songs.
When I was unmoored and unmoved by those claiming to be lovers.
Because what did they love...exactly?
How could it have been love
if it wasn’t relentless enough to open the floodgates?
If it wasn’t diligent enough to swim through the back channels?
If it never unearthed my origin story?
If it never made me porous?
If it never made me come? home?
I sing a new song with you.
About cracking open.
churning, churning, churning.
A song that plants a sweet ache.
This ocean inside me is not mine alone.
Come.
Let’s find our waterline.
And exceed it.
About the Poet
Natasha Thomas is a writer, educator, creative-activist, consultant, and healing arts practitioner working at the intersection of social, transformative, healing justice, sacred wellness, and spiritual liberation. She currently works for the Michigan Organization on Adolescent Sexual Health (MOASH), is the former executive director of RAISE IT UP! Youth Arts & Awareness, and her work has been featured in Teen Vogue, NPR, PBS NewsHour, Broadway World, Huffington Post, Mashable, Vulture, Revolt, Blavity, and more. Follow Nastasha on Instagram.
About the Photographer
Elia Nadie is a transmasc, non-binary, neurodivergent person with disability from Italy. They work with illustration and experimental film photography, mixing analog and digital techniques. Their work focuses on creating inclusive content by re-centering marginalized people, and on translating complex concepts into accessible visual forms. They employ a mixed approach to thematic research in their work, through the lenses of qualitative sociology, design thinking, queer and crip studies and their embodied experience.
