Amber Atiya

The ER nurse performs an EKG and forgets to remove the metal electrodes. I return home after midnight, a twelve-nippled goddess with a purple bag of pantry goods the hospital social worker insists I take: saltines, a jar of roasted red bell peppers, and two cans of split pea soup made by a company I’ve read mistreats its workers. I slip out of my tee shirt. A nipple falls from my arm leaving a sticky residue. My heart is fine but my Albuterol inhaler is expired. I consider using the electrodes for collage, turning my hospital wristbands into jewelry. Whenever I had a doctor’s appointment while at the shelter, I’d steal hospital socks, rolls of tissue, latex tourniquets, tea bags, sugar packets, extra cups. I’d raid supermarket restrooms for cleaning products I could persuade shelter security to let me smuggle up to the dorm.

My first winter at the facility, the social services team bought me a coat without asking what color I wanted. They bought snow boots without asking my shoe size. I was told that if they didn’t fit, it was too bad because they couldn’t be returned. I gave away an ice blue hat and scarf set. Gave away the snow boots which were a size too big. Although I loathed the coat, I wore it because it was warm. After I left the shelter, I donated the coat to the Salvation Army and gave away most of my old tops and dresses. I’ve seen three residents since I moved. One panhandling at Fulton Street. One newly ambulating with a walker. The third charging down Atlantic in her signature bandanna, gray sweats. When the women voted her most likely to live to a hundred, she towered over us in the restroom like an action figure, hands on hips, and grinned and blushed, my homegirl, my fine, fine heart, twirling in a soaked red towel.

*

On the evening of my house warming, shots ring through the park across the street. My girlfriends chew potato salad, scoop up hot crab dip with shards of Ritz crackers. Someone asks if a bottle of Moet was popped. Someone asks to borrow a ten ‘til her SSI hits. Someone gifts me a well-loved tablet, a crack shaped like a bolt of lightning at the left corner of the screen. Someone requests a stick of unsalted butter to take home. Her twin eyes the canned kidney beans on top of the fridge. An ex madam campaigns to roll up in my bathroom. Her new wife warns me of two red droplets on the toilet seat. Her ex-wife slips me three dollar scratch offs and a note: its ok 4 me to take hot shwer after everyone leave? Another googles “restraining order” on a Samsung device, sucking her only thumb. Another addicted to tanning beds climbs out of my first floor window to bask in the light of a cop car. The last to arrive and the first to leave takes pics of her bruised eye and scabbed lower lip. Texts them to multiple numbers. Nuggets of faux pearl quivering at her neck.

*

A gallon of water fresh from the coconut costs $25.00 at Bravo’s on Winthrop. For $7.50 more they’ll scoop its meat into a plastic baggie. The price of a large oxtail dinner is $24.00 at the Jamaican spot on Sutter, but their best kept secret is the goat roti. Be prepared to pay $11.00 for a kool-aid spoon’s worth of curried goat, potatoes, chickpeas, and gravy in a heated womb of dough. Two doors down shea butter dude raises the price of everything by thirty cents. Queen Helene cocoa butter sticks are now $2.70. A small tub of shea? $6.40. How I’ma score horsetail at $8.00 a pop when I have to pay out of pocket for three medications? If you’re poor enough you might can nab a free tablet courtesy of the government, but I wouldn’t trust it. Nor would I trust the plants sold two for one at Dollar Discount, insects the color of nectarines climbing up from the soil of a bonsai, backs mottled with wood shavings. A Heineken from the soul food joint is damn near $10. Buy two and offer one to the self-made widow who does box-braids out of her house for $30.00 below the going rate. She’ll appreciate how the bottle holds small blades of ice in its throat like a magician, offer you homemade banana bread. Wonder out loud how long the moon’s been trapped in a cycle of binging and purging light.

*

It ain’t the stench of cigarettes or weed, and it ain’t barbecue up in flames on the electric burner, so what else they cookin upstairs? Not upstairs as in heaven, though the stink of death is in the air, so it could be heaven a floor up airing out new arrivals. When my neighbors aren’t outside haunting Livonia, they’re indoors sifting through the garbage in the basement of our supportive housing complex. Every night after 10pm, a dirty blonde bangs a pot up and down the corridor, the next best thing to a Newport when you’ve quit but the voices don’t quit and the smoke calms them. I know the word “brioche” but lack access to its sweetness, a class of poor too intimidated to walk into a Garden of Eden, the kind who can’t tell a Kalamata from a Halkidiki. Once, I won a jar of garlic stuffed olives at a church fete, slapped the jar’s bottom and popped the lid, plucked one from the juice, sucked it down, and died on the church steps, me and a bare-assed angel dribbling into a small pool of coins.

*

A dorm mate from my former shelter believes the soul makes a kissing sound as it flees the ruins of the body. In this lifetime, she resurrected with a scar along the left cheek, daisy tucked behind her ear like a born again. Rumor has it science is close to bringing just about anything back from the brink—the rat rotting at the entrance of CVS, the one-winged moth that tumbled from the metal rail of a train car into the emerald nest of a woman’s lap, a child in its stroller flapping a single arm in solidarity. The child would never die, nor the woman stroking the still brown wing in disbelief, as if it had fallen, like a single dreadlock, from her own body. But what of her grief fluttering through every straphanger for eternity?

*

No one loves me? No one loves me? A woman from my building asks the doormen, her white and orange plaid button down wrinkled, collar popped. The two gray suited men give her a sympathetic stare but remain silent. I can think of a couple women at the shelter who would have answered no just to watch her cry and relapse under a super moon.

A blind resident had a fatal heart attack outside the facility. Another overdosed, found in bed with no pulse. Staff were directed to put up signs in the restrooms: “friends don’t sell friends fentanyl.” Residents who had done serious bids regularly compared the shelter to prison. An ex dorm mate told me the same company that provided our cots, blankets, and shower slippers also furnished American prisons.

People like to donate to shelters during the holidays, providing clothing, bath, and beauty products. It’s no secret that staff steal items for themselves. Once, dozens of metro cards meant for clients “went missing” from a locked drawer in the housing specialist’s office.

If I based my self-worth on how I was treated at the shelter, I too might be led to believe that no one loved me. Of the two women I gave my number to when I moved out of the facility, one never picked up when I called. The other continues to struggle with addiction, ghosting me for months at a time. I tell myself there isn’t a shred of poetry left in this survival song, and yet I can’t stop myself digging at this patch of dirt in my heart where women have buried needles, the names of johns, the sons who claim their belongings when they die, suddenly and naked in shelter-motel rooms, a stoic Briscoe from Law & Order the sole witness to the final moments of their lives.

*

My entire life—being born, the youngest of eight, into an extended family of educators and artists, riding shotgun with my dad to Saturday morning meditation, listening intently as he explained that we’re all made of “star stuff,” that energy is never stagnant, how we’re always moving closer to or away from our goals, writing love songs at seven, dropping out of school at 13 (and again at 15 and again as a junior in college and again and again), developing an obsession with Brazil in my early 20s and Kemet in my late 20s, becoming a poet and performer, crafting books and paper-based jewelry, making small scale abstract artworks (which I couldn’t have predicted in a million years) my ongoing battle with chronic health issues, the stress of homelessness, rekindling my interest in astrology, working with dice and oracle cards, all of it—was always leading me towards a spiritual path.

Simultaneously navigating illness and fighting my way out of a single women’s shelter (like the Warriors bopping their way from the Bronx to Coney Island after Osiris is shot) is one of the best things that could have happened to me. In order to survive the system, I had to be hyper aware of my surroundings. There was a religious sensibility among residents that couldn’t keep the late-night brawls at bay. Jesus had them in a chokehold, and if it wasn’t Jesus, it was Muhammad.

The same resident who waxed poetic about Elegua on Thursday morning was threatening to off herself and everyone in the facility by Friday night. A Muslim woman, whose name no one knew, whose locker remained defiantly open, empty but for a handful of her own clothes and baby gowns that kept sliding onto the floor, was warned by her case manager that she would have to shower if she wanted visitation with her daughter.

The young Israelite in my dorm hallucinating spiders and cockroaches nearly killed everyone on the second floor with insecticide that left residents coughing for hours. Her son was being cared for by the father’s second “wife.” Once, she called and they wouldn’t put him on the phone. Soon after she started wearing socks on her hands to keep from scratching at the bugs burrowing into her skin. Soon after that, she tried to blind herself, convinced that bugs were crawling in her eyes.

Another woman in my room would palm a large keloid on her upper arm as she prayed, hair expertly cornrowed, bra thrown haphazardly over the top of her locker. She’d caress that keloid like a good luck charm, kiss her crucifix throughout the day. Despite her devotion to the lord, the man she loved ran off with another woman, abandoned her at a Popeyes in East New York. She vowed never to give him a divorce. After signing for her bed each night, she’d rush to the restroom to pray in whatever stall was available. She prayed louder than she snored, which earned her enemies, women who came to the restroom after lights out to smoke, relax, and play old school r&b, not to hear some holy bitch wailing & moaning over a man.

When I say you won’t find a group of people more devout, more willing to embrace the miraculous, than homeless women, I do not exaggerate. I loved and loathed them. I was accused of practicing witchcraft by them. One resident who asked me to share a home with her in the Rockaways was booted from the facility for threatening a case worker with a pair of scissors. Who the fuck gave her scissors? Certainly not god.

For decades I’ve been searching for something that I didn’t completely understand. As a child I’d close my eyes and see black and white squares similar to a checker board spinning clockwise in the distance, floating toward me. The closer the squares got, the faster they spun, disappearing into a burst of light that became the cosmos, the galaxy transposed onto my eyelids. I was meditating and didn’t realize it. In my 20s and 30s I had intense dreams about the ocean, mermaids, learning how to live off the land by watching elders, healing the sick with herbal remedies. During the pandemic, I rarely dreamt but could sense that something in me was shifting. Evolving.

My friend invited me to a meditation for Palestine in Union Square, which I attended. We did a short walking meditation, and I kept stumbling, my body straying from the circle. It was absurd to me that I struggled to walk in a circle, so absurd I started crying. I hadn’t noticed until that moment how the soles of my feet ached, how I brought all my weight, all my trauma, my deep, deep sorrow, down on them. It never occurred to me to have compassion for my feet for all they had endured.

In late 2025, while preparing a pork chop for a kind of baptism—bathing, drying, seasoning, sautéing—I felt a strong breeze pass through my chest. I stood at my kitchen counter, barefoot, with animal fat and blood under my nails, my heart a wind tunnel, and nearly cried but didn’t. This went on long enough for the oil to get smoky, but I couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything but give the wind grace. It was like all the trucks on the I95, all their metal and rubber screeching to a halt to allow a mother and her ducklings to cross from one side of the road to the other.

Like the mother, my instincts have led me to water. An astrologer advised me to make my home near the ocean. Sometimes I sit at the pond in Central Park listening to my 90s playlist through earbuds, the ducks at peace within their ripples, the pigeons warring over bagel crumbs. This may not be what the astrologer had in mind, but New York City is an island, the beautiful awful land of my birth.

My soul has nested here 45 years. I meditate a couple of times a week and have been working with astrology dice since early 2025. I’ve had eerie experiences as a result of meditation. A couple of nights ago, I dreamt of the world tarot card. I’m not a tarot reader, but there it was, an unmistakable sense of water, of the union of Aquarius and Pisces. I felt it. I have an airy birth chart. Yes, I think entirely too fucking much. It took four and a half decades for me to give myself permission to fully connect to the divine world through emotional intelligence and intuition and not just intellectual curiosity.

There’s no resolution to this random thought, nothing to wrap up nice and neatly here. I am ongoing, both an old soul and spiritually wet behind the ears. I am remembering why the hell I’m here, embodying soul purpose one day at a time.

Artist Statement

After spending 20 months at a New York City women’s shelter, I moved into supportive housing, which the nyc.gov website describes as “a combination of affordable housing and support services designed to help individuals and families use housing as a platform for health and recovery following a period of homelessness, hospitalization or incarceration or for youth aging out of foster care.”

I experienced supportive housing as an extension of the shelter system, often infantilizing tenants, denying them basic autonomy over the space in which they live and pay rent for. I didn’t see my unit until two days before my scheduled move–in, which is when I discovered the “micro studio” had only two electric burners and no oven. I also found out the landlord, a local nonprofit, had installed their own furniture, which they refused to remove. The alternative to signing the lease—residing at the shelter indefinitely during a pandemic, potentially losing three months of disability benefits for every nine months I remained in the system—would have been disastrous. After almost two years at a shelter, sleeping in a bed that didn’t belong to me, that I had to sign for every night, I found myself in a similar predicament with no choice but to use the landlord’s dresser, bed, and cement–hued table set, unable to fully enjoy the independent and dignified life people transitioning out of the shelter system deserve.

As I find my way back to art making, I’ve decided to document my fight for fair housing using tools most immediately available to me: pen, paper, and cellphone. Unlike art and book binding materials—paints, alcohol inks, awls, needles, scalpels, scissors—these objects are less likely to be confiscated by security. They’re also more affordable and less likely to be stolen than professional audio/visual equipment. In the spirit of making due with what I have, I hope to build a multidisciplinary body of work that honors my battle with apathetic and exploitative systems of government as well as the physical and psychic limitations of my own body.

In solidarity with institutionalized people worldwide,
Amber Atiya