Blood Maps

They’ve monetised our mystery

crystal balls gathering dust in Urban Outfitters windows,

tarot decks blessed by Instagram witches

who’ve never tasted the iron tang of wagon wheels

grinding bone-dust from cobblestones,

never felt their throats burn with “pikey”

spat like acid from mouths that clutch our silver

for twenty quid and call it vintage, authentic, spiritually awakening.

I am caught between the England that carved me

from its colonial concrete and television static

and the blood that pounds like hoofbeats in my temples,

calling me home to a place that exists only

in the geography of longing,

a culture that breathes in the spaces between heartbeats,

scattered like bone fragments across a landscape of deliberate forgetting.

Somewhere in the chasm between belonging and exile I bleed,

a walking wound shaped like five centuries of burning.

My great-grandmother carried our stories in the cathedral of her throat

no parchment, no stone tablets,

just the pulsing archive of her pulse, and when death

took her tongue, whole constellations

of memory collapsed into silence.

In the Porrajmos they fed our children to ovens,

measured our skulls like melons at market,

sterilised our women like stray bitches.

The smoke of our burning still tastes bitter

in morning fog rolling across European fields

where wildflowers push through mass graves

unmarked, uncounted, unremembered.

My grandmother learned to shed her skin like a snake,

to bury her Roma soul so deep

that even her own womb forgot

the lullabies that should have been birthright.

She loved the gadje man with hands like hammers

and let him build walls around her wildness

until she became a ghost haunting her own body.

How do you excavate a history designed to rot?

The hipsters in Shoreditch wear our scarves like war paint,

burn our sage like party tricks,

feast on our aesthetics like vultures

while the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act

sharpens its teeth on our nomadic bones,

criminalising the very rhythm of our breath

while museums display our stolen culture

under spotlights bright as interrogation lamps.

This body is a battleground of contradictions

BBC English rolling off a tongue that dreams in Romani,

dreams I’ve had to learn from strangers on YouTube

who carry the inheritance I was robbed of.

My passport bleeds British blue but my pulse

beats to drums I can only feel, never hear,

ancestral thunder echoing through DNA

when conscious thought has forgotten how to listen.

The settled world tastes only stereotype when it looks at me

dirty, dangerous, different,

a threat to their manicured lawns and their children’s innocence.

The Roma world smells only absence on my skin

no language learned at my mother’s breast,

no customs flowing through generations like honey,

no earned place at fires where real stories

crackle and burn and resurrect themselves nightly.

I am the scar tissue between Anglo and Romani,

the wound that connects and separates simultaneously,

living proof of what cultural genocide looks like

when it wears a graduation cap

and speaks the Queen’s English.

They study us in ivory towers now,

write dissertations about our “fascinating traditions”

while our children vanish into state machinery

at rates that would make Mengele weep with joy.

They sell our patterns in high street temples

while we’re still hunted, herded, disappeared

from every scrap of earth we dare call sanctuary.

This is the arithmetic of erasure:

one generation gagged,

the next buried alive,

the third left drinking ghosts from empty cups.

Yet still I wake each dawn

swallowing both rejections like broken glass,

learning to love how they slice my throat,

how they mark me as neither fully here nor there

but something else entirely

a bridge between worlds that fear their own reflection,

that need each other more desperately

than they’ll ever confess in daylight.

This is my inheritance: the sweet ache of almost-belonging,

the fierce ecstasy of carving new roads

when all paths lead into wilderness,

the revolutionary act of breathing

when your very existence threatens

their neat mythology of us and them.

In the end, I am what survival tastes like

bitter, incomplete, but undeniably alive,

carrying forward what fragments I can salvage

and birthing new traditions from the ashes

of the ones they tried to bury

with my great-grandmother’s voice.

*Opre Roma.* 

The struggle continues,

even when we’ve forgotten how to pronounce it,

even when we must learn our own battle cry

from the mouths of strangers

who remember what we were taught to forget.