a promise of lightning is a group of quilted and embroidered multilayered silkscreens on paper. It takes inspiration from the network of connections made among trees in a forest and translates them into a palimpsest of silvery images layering different vantage points into a non-hierarchal space. Gathered together, trees can form vast, evolving webs of visible and invisible layers in which resources, distress signals, and memories are in continual exchange. Intergenerational communication is key to their survival. Embroidered into this shape shifting visual space are handwritten words, accumulating to poetic reflections on intimacy and organizing between shadows and light. Taking its title from Audre Lorde’s 1973 poem “Movement Song,” which explores both loss and hope, the work reflects on how might we consider queerness as a form of multi-temporal relations to and within wider hegemonic cultures? How might under-known frameworks of the natural world conceptually and emotionally expand our capacity for resilience? a promise of lightning ties lineages of concrete and ghostly gestures into a queer history of resistance facing a new present.