Worldling - Julia DaSilva

If you cannot do it because you have any hope of success, do it for the train rolling out at midnight as you bike

home: that moment when the creaking of your oil-desperate wheels syncs with the corrugated steel clanking on the tracks and the sky sickly with city lights is just

contented-bleak enough to remind you that you are an inhabitant of the world. And if you worry yourself too worldly too unprincipled choose a rock from the beach and as it dries it will distill your last few shiny hopes for

higher things, carry the dull lump with you as you mount your bike the next day and the next. If you can’t do it for belief breathe into the pedals and know

“bleak” is the common name of a river-fish that prefers open water, once used to make artificial pearls—take one, roll

it in your worldly hands, throw it as you ride

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Julia DaSilva graduated from the University of Toronto with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and Literature & Critical Theory. Her poetry has appeared in Eclectica, Rat’s Ass Review, Lychee Rind zine, Cathexis, the Sapphic Writers Collective’s Sapphics in Lockdown, the University of Toronto journals The Spectatorial, The Strand, and Hardwire. She is a guest in Tkaronto/Toronto on Dish With One Spoon territory, and writes fantasy as well as poetry, with a novel and a collection of short stories in progress and a particular interest in the politics of magic systems. Her writing is informed by her work in climate justice organizing, and explores questions of political responsibility and queerness, embodiment, love and hope in worlds coming apart and being rebuilt.