What This Breathing is a poetic experience that journeys across opacities in the lived underside of the hetero—patriarchal organization of social life. It searches for a language through which to reimagine relation: to the past, to other people, to self, to historical and ecological time, and to futurity in an age when the daily, even hourly, accretions of systemic violence render the present a seemingly endless end in itself. Weaving together multiple temporal and representational perspectives, the collection traverses what is inherited, what is overdetermined by layers of overt generational erasure and the repetition of simplified scripts. Its interruptions and aporias are a form of truth—telling, though they cannot be read (really) as a narrative account of events. Rather, what emerges is a commitment to what remains open to reinterpretations, to retellings that will change the story.