Stolen Petals
i.
arctic breezes dance
overhead in a waltz that
promises sweet hands
ii.
angry aegean
god rumbles as he holds me
hostage for a kiss
iii.
his crocodile lips
like sandpaper against me
and I am worn down
iv.
chiffon waved as I
submit in desperate hope
of a safe future
v.
honey stolen from
thighs of lace in a leather
night full of headlights
vi.
chili flames and choked
sobs in the corner of the
bathtub as stars shine
vii.
bury me with the
salmon amongst the coral
drown the veins with dirt
The Wrong-Left Men
I told them who I am
at face value
behind the mask of anonymity
and they scoffed as they
disagreed
they refused to believe
in me and said, as if facts
just you wait
just you wait and you’ll see
you’ll be a bigger freak than me
once you ‘gasm for the first time
you’ll feel just how sublime
and you’ll be the biggest freak
under your coral colored sheets
or they whisper in their pixels
about how I haven’t met the right man
they could be the right man
I’m the right man
I’ll be your man
and prove you wrong
all night long
my lips would twist
into a sneer
hiding the fear
trying to appear
unphased
by their insincere
displaced
concerned
just you wait
he’ll prove you wrong
I’ll prove you wrong
just let me know when
and where
I’ll grab your hair
you’ll become putty in my hands
and you’ll thank me later
once you understand
how grand it is
to be with this man
no matter how many times
I say or browbeat them
away
they come back with the ferocity
only found in men
who desire a quickie
nothing more
nothing less
for it’s a chore
I guess
let me be your man
and I’ll set you straight
away from the grey
I’ll open the floodgates
with my fingers
and together we’ll create
something beautiful in you
it’s me
I’ll be the beautiful
in you
their words are blowfish stingers
and they whine into their liquor
as if injured
by rejection
and refused affection
since I won’t let them
add me to their collection
of erection holders
I told them who I am
at face value
and showed them the grey
that plays in my mind
on repeat
but they scoffed and
disagreed
and they promised
they’d
fix me
His prayers aren’t answered and they get pizza in the end
It was on a king sized bed
her head resting on his chest
watching a movie
while his thumb traced figure eights
between her soft knuckles
where her walls began to melt
under the heat of his protective
obsessive
gaze
He reached his hand through
the pliable concrete
and took a firm grasp of her fingers
in order to dislocate her shoulder
and pull her closer to his heart
Every word was a jackhammer
lined with sandpaper
and they wore her down
but she didn’t mind
as his maple sap words
were sweet in her ears
after they’d once been accustomed to
accosting
It was on a king sized bed
her hair pinned between his t shirt
and the faded black hoodie
with peeling red letters
she wore as a safety blanket
where he braided their fingers together
and brought her palm to rest
on the hardened hem of his gym shorts
one eyebrow reaching skyward
praying to the heavens that she
gives in to the temptation
She tried to say no and yet
her tongue turned into the Sahara
words failed to form
so she just recoiled
an armadillo in slow mo
as her walls froze under his touch
rebar installed
between the peeling twine
of looped fingers
He groaned in annoyance
cutting the movie short
deciding he was hungry
and they left for pizza
where she left her wall behind
bricking and boarding the doorframe
that led to the king sized bed
When I Wish I Was A Knot*
They’re:
vintage spools;
discarded twine;
a rat king’s crown;
thrift store necklaces;
cloud-hugging contrails;
tossed around paperclips;
hand-me-down Christmas lights;
calcified remains of a prehistoric mother;
prematurely torn hair in a dollar store scrunchie;
*originally published with The Word’s Faire
Artist Statement
Beginning in 2021, the unexpected resurgence of embodied trauma—phantom pain stemming from past experiences of violence—drove Kajitani's current artistic direction. Their photograph-based digital collage references this experience to question the whereabouts of an ignored body, pretended never to have existed. This body, central to their work, is conceived as "a fictional body made tangible by pain," which is also the "another body" previously "sculpted by pain" and nurtured through violence. Akin to a ghost, it drifts between presence and absence.
Becoming a model wasn't a conscious choice for Kajitani; rather, the preceding "pain sculpted them into a model over time," creating this "another body" through violence, perhaps even unbeknownst to themself.
This visceral trigger, rooted in trauma, initiated a body-led creative process, making art essential for survival. Kajitani approaches their fragmented body as "a single grain of social noise." Engaging this experience not as a victim, but as a creator, they utilize techniques like editing and collage. Functioning akin to "somatic excavation"—unearthing and rearranging memories rooted in the body—these techniques help navigate and sublimate intimate trauma. This process seeks not to restore the past but to reconfigure fragments towards a "prosthetic wholeness"—a new path earnestly sought through a digital-age prayer.
Paradoxically, the accumulated pain, particularly in the abdomen—a site of intense assault —transforms from mere suffering into a reservoir accepting diverse energies, gazes, dreams, and discrimination.
Meaningful Damage
When you spend your teenage years with a broken, rotting husk in the part of you that should be a pale, clean thing — a flower, a dove, a raw egg — you spend a lot of time telling yourself that it makes you better. You stare at the walls of your room for hours, or sweat through your hoodie in the summer heat, or teach yourself how to hide the scent of cigarettes from your homeroom teacher. The essay you write for your college admissions is excellent, and you spiral secret notebooks with dripping ink and blunt pencil scratches. At night, when the wind batters at the hatches over your window and your phone screen glows with the parties you can’t go to (aren’t invited to), you curl into your own arms and picture the day you, a shattered bowl, seal yourself with gold and fill up with a broth that fixes things. That makes everything better, healing the other broken girls with its strength.
And slowly, with tentative steps on the edge of the pool and choking down small stones, you start to do the work. You lock yourself in the bathroom at school and trail pink highlighters over a self-help book you stole from the library. A podcast plays in your ears. By candlelight, you change your own bandages and drag an alcohol-soaked cotton ball over your wounds, burying them under shirt sleeves and blazers. The shrink who you almost make cry in your first session tells you that your chart shows all the progress you’ve made, sticks another gold star to your forehead. You get a cat, and a scholarship. You find new dorm rooms to stare at.
Then, one day, you wake up. There’s a moment that happens — a blurry scene in a film, a page in a book, an old journal falling open. Someone on the street that looks a little too much like him. You reach your hand up to the aching cavern in your chest, the one that you taught yourself how to live with, the driving force, the moral compass you carry with you. And it doesn’t hurt as badly. Not anymore.
Something inside of you shatters. You’re not a better person. You haven’t saved the world. All these years, you thought it was making you larger than life, a hero, someone to be believed in. You work in a minimum wage customer service job. You love people. You smile at bartenders. It’s alright; it’s not a bad life. You’re as close to happy as you’ve ever been.
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But you spent so long gripping onto this pain, hanging onto it like it was a lifeline, wrapping yourself around it. You’re untethered, loose, floating. The locket you wore around your neck your whole life is gone. For years, you thought this made you better, stronger, something special. It’s comforting that it doesn’t define you anymore. That you can look in the mirror and see something in your eyes that isn’t a tragedy in two parts. By now the curtain’s down and the lights are out, and you don’t know your lines anymore. The scene you rehearsed for has ended. There is no applause.
It’s better, sure. You know that it’s better — on paper, in the way you flinch less often, your heart is less guarded. This is what you wanted, yearned for, all those years. Sometimes you wear dresses now.
But a part of you — sometimes an almost nonexistent part, sometimes a boulder that bears down on your throat and organs and chokes the air from the room — misses it. Not the pain, exactly, but the comfort of knowing that things can’t get any worse than this. You miss the wall you built up inside of yourself, the cavern that kept you from feeling.
You have to learn to find new comforts. Tangling your hands through blossoms, burning your mouth on coffee, buying used books. Reminding yourself that this was the whole point. You survived. You made it out. It was never your job to save anyone but yourself.
It still doesn’t mean that it doesn’t haunt you, late at night. Sometimes you look at the people you love and wonder if they would have held you in the really bad nights, all those years ago. Most of the time, you’re just glad the nightmares are less frequent now.
You’re just glad things are better.
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Memory
Memory
is full of holes. A temple missing color
interpreted through a modern lens.
Unnecessary moments committed to the shredder
treasures locked away for a rainy day.
Or at least, I assume.
My earliest are of not remembering
the time I had a lisp
being the pink Power Ranger for Halloween.
No one remembers their early childhood, I heard
so that was me, at four
five
six
eleven
thirteen.
I want to write horror
words to be remembered in nightmares
birthing panic attacks on the train
imagining bones broken and limbs tied.
Write about childhood fears, the greats say
but I don’t want to write about
losing the house to the bank
not getting into college
being trapped in a small town forever.
So I grab my shovel and dig.
Mental permafrost halts my blade
but I see glitter past the ice
broken glass and shattered stone.
The Geiger counter crackles to life
this is not a place of honor
no great deeds commemorated here.
The beryllium shell breeches the surface
a memory of not-remembering.
A girl afraid of her father
doing things she had no words for
but only colors
shapes
impressions
and roiling doubt.
“Surely, if that happened to me, I would remember.
No one would ever forget that!”
There’s a line between the half-spheres
promise of the plutonium within
festering for decades
a 20,000 year half-promise
of venom for the waters of my soul.
A quick twist of the shovel to pop it open
release a brilliant flash of blue
burning until only my shadow remains
and in no shape to write a best-seller
defeating the entire purpose of this expedition.
I leave the demon core be
the sleeping dragon’s tail untickled;
I can write about them instead
perhaps one with a treasure that can end the world
locked away for a rainy day.
The Hair Cut
It was my last year as a teenager, three months into being 19. On this gloomy Thursday afternoon in October, I wanted to change my hair. I drove from the city to the suburbs to have lunch with my mom and check out this new hair salon. “It recently opened down the street and has cheap prices. Just try it out. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to go again,” she said as she dropped me off. I walked in and a middle-aged man with classic dark features greeted me. My mom left to run some errands and said she would be back in an hour or so to pick me up. “I’ll text you when I’m outside,” she said as she left. For the next hour, it was just me and this man, alone in his salon. We spent most of the time talking about my college experience and what his inspiration was to open a salon. Though his questions were very personal, I didn’t think he meant to be inappropriate, just friendly, so I answered him honestly. The more he talked to me, the more uncomfortable I became. It crossed a line when he said, “Do you have a boyfriend?” and “Do you know how beautiful you are?” I tried to convince myself to feel more comfortable about being alone in a space with an older man, who was clearly asking inappropriate questions. I didn’t want to accept my initial fear instinct, assuming it had to be me who was wrong about him. After what seemed like forever, my haircut and color were finished, and my mom was running late. “Hey, I’ve really enjoyed your company. I’d love to treat you to a free massage,” the man proposed. “We can go in the back to my massage room.” Confused by this, I froze, not knowing how to answer. He then interjected with three words I wish I could forget: “Don’t be shy.” Still giving him the benefit of the doubt, I thought to myself that this was harmless. He’s just gregarious and not interested in me in that way. I’ve been told I dramatize everything, and I didn’t want to trust myself or my assumptions about the circumstance. As he led me into the back of his salon, I felt a jolt of shock when he asked me to take off my top. “I give great massages,” he said. As the 19-year-old girl I was, now in the back room with this 45-year-old man, I still did not recognize the severity of this situation. I gave myself nervous permission to go against everything my intuition was telling me. I then proceeded to unbutton my top. This is when the flashbacks hit me the hardest. If I let myself unblock this moment, I can still feel the touch of his clammy, masculine hands on my soft, cold body. I can remember how uncomfortable I was, trying to hold my hand over my breast and me making a joke about how I didn’t need that part of my body touched. Then I remember him insisting, and hearing the dark tone of his voice urge me to “just relax.” I was now watching this happen from outside my body, witnessing everything from the perspective of my own ghost. I remember sitting up, with my breasts exposed, unable to move. The light chill of the room was jolting goosebumps throughout my body. For what felt like an eternity, I just sat there, letting his hands “massage” my tender and now, cold breasts. “You are filled out nicely, dear,” his voice said hauntingly. As this was happening, I could feel small doses of my preserved innocence being taken away from me. My trust in the world and in myself was receding. As I felt unable to stop it from happening, I kept thinking, how could I not have seen this coming? Helpless, I felt trapped by the circumstance, frozen in my body. I told myself I had willingly walked to the back room with him. Maybe I had led him on. I felt responsible for the situation in a way that has taken me years to overcome. Years to realize that I was actually a victim of sexual assault. After this had happened, I was so angry. The thing is, I was mostly just angry at myself. I saw myself as strong and smart. How could I have opened myself up to this situation? The pain of feeling this could be my fault doubled down on the pain of the experience itself. Next time, I will be smarter, I thought. I will keep my guard up from here on out. Never again will I be weak. What I didn’t understand is that I should have held that man accountable. Instead, I put that shame on myself. I let embarrassment overcome acceptance. Denial made me feel safe, like it had never happened. I could dissociate from the experience, and avoid the shame I was holding over myself. As long as I lived in this world of denial, I wouldn’t ever have to live in the world where I had to relive this moment. “This only happens to people who are weak,” I thought to myself. I never wanted to be put in that category. I sincerely told myself that I was sexually assaulted because I was weak. As long as I kept this memory just within myself, no one would see my “weakness.” I wish I could go back to that 19 year old girl and tell her how strong she was and how unfortunate of a situation this was. And how it wasn’t her fault. Ever. It wasn’t until the time of the Me Too movement, that I started taking stock of this disturbing October day more and more. It then hit me that I, for so long, could resonate with all of these victim’s voices. We were never weak—we were just silenced. The silence and fear over time morphed into the thought that we were the problem. How reassuring it was to understand that we were not. I hated that I needed the reassurance of many others in being able to come forward with my story. I hated that I silenced my own voice for him. For the fear of others not believing me. For the fear that I would be seen as this fragile basket case of a woman, instead of the strong and empowered woman I actually was. But over time, I found my voice and could see the entirety of what had happened. I have kept most of this experience blocked out of my mind. But at times, pieces of it come back to me. When these pieces form together to make a memory, my heart starts beating dramatically and my stomach instantly drops. Suddenly, I start feeling uncomfortable even in my own skin. Disgust and shame move in, and my mind is lost within those feelings. When the memory passes, I promise myself to push it out next time. It’s better to feel nothing than to feel this, I always thought. It took eight years for me to tell anyone what had happened. Still, to this day, I have only told about five people. For so long, I didn’t want to accept that this was a part of my story. I didn’t want to give that man in the salon the right to be remembered. But in order to be honest with you, I have to be honest with myself about the memories that have molded me into the person I will forever keep trying to understand. Throughout these past eight years, I’ve gained confidence from my peers to finally set myself free. I’ve been able to release that part of me that has held onto this bad experience, so that I can make room to accept more of the good. My breakthrough moment was when I realized I was never alone. To this day, as much as I look back at that moment in the salon, I also look back at the drive home. So frequently do I wish I could re-do the moments of that car ride and tell her what happened. I picture how different my memory of this day would have been if I had just told her right away. How free I could have felt. How I had more power than I thought I did and could have held him accountable for his actions. I now know never to silence myself or let anyone do the silencing for me. Most importantly, I’ve understood that I should never underestimate what I am deserving of. I have and always will be deserving of the truth, and of the love and comfort that comes from telling the truth. When my mom picked me up that afternoon, I got in the car and felt like I had lost my voice. “Your hair looks nice. Do you think you want to go back there again for the next one?” she said. I looked into the mirror, only to someone unrecognizable, inside and out. As I gazed back at the salon, I watched the man’s silhouette and swallowed my tongue. “No, I’m not that happy with it. I think the color is off. I don’t want to go again.” “Okay honey. You don’t have to go back again,” she said. I then held on to the safety of her words and let them take me all the way home.
Artist Statement
My work explores the hidden fractures and quiet leakages within LGBTQ+ experience—those emotional and bodily ruptures that are often obscured by systems claiming to be open, rational, or safe. The fusion of flesh and faucet becomes a metaphor for the exhaustion of identity and the slow erosion of the body under invisible control.
As a gender fluid artist, I move through environments that label themselves as neutral, yet constantly demand adjustment. The body becomes a conduit. It carries water, memory, pressure. No one asks where the flow begins or what is lost in the process.
These works trace a soft violence. They follow the moments when skin begins to recall what it has endured, when function gives way to feeling, and when the self pushes back through rupture.
