You Should Know What Comfort Does to my Body

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Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.

Issue 51: Translation

Guest Editor: James Nguyen

Editors: Victoria Pham, Varsha Ramesh, Daley Rangi, Kathryne Genevieve Honey, Debris Facility, Lamisse Hamouda, Anneka Scholtz

Digital Producers: Yanti Peng, Amy Yu, Giana Festa, Daniel Pini, Rafael Enriquez, Sonya Ishimnikova

Cover Design: Amy Yu

Issue 51: Translation
Published September 2026

Issue 51: Translation is assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.

You Should Know What Comfort Does to my Body
Ellen van Neerven and Jessica Kejun Xu

Co-Translator’s Note
Our neurodivergent crip racialised queer bodies often feel that we can’t be loved and understood exactly as we are, without interdependent systems of care to weather systems of harm, marginalisation, and dehumanisation that we experience and internalise. Our lives and work do not happen in the isolation of war, genocides, NDIS cuts and inaccessibility, harms to Country, ancestors and kin.

Access intimacy (Mia Mingus, 2011) is a form of translating needs into care, but also can be felt as bypassing translation, being an unspoken connection between disabled people who understand and accommodate each other’s needs.

This project translates invisibilised, and sometimes intimately understood, neurodivergent crip experiences into poetry, sound, and calligraphic drawings, emerging from reflections within and connections between us, where the dreaming happens. We experiment with translating our experiences and needs into communicable forms, reflecting our conversational way of creating together when low on spoons. We also play with representing access intimacy as non-translation, rather a knowing shared by people with similar enough disabled lived experiences, who recognise each other’s body languages of access needs. This unspoken element is represented through Blakout/erasure poetry, parts which are deliberately hidden in the spirit of the right to opacity (from Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation).

Audio and image descriptions complement the spoken, sound and visual elements - a creative translation of forms that could but may not always be literally understood, but felt and experienced through other senses of knowing.

Ellen van Neerven (they/them) is a non-binary neurodivergent writer, editor and educator of Mununjali Yugambeh and Dutch heritage. Their fiction debut Heat and Light (UQP, 2014), poetry collections Comfort Food (UQP, 2016) and Throat (UQP, 2020), and non fiction Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity (UQP, 2023; Two Dollar Radio, 2024) have received awards in multiple literary prizes. Their play, swim, produced by Griffin Theatre Company, premiered at Carriageworks in Sydney in 2024.

EvN’s latest book Ruby’s Web (Magabala, 2026) is a middle-grade novel about finding your voice, seeking help, addressing cyberbullying and victimisation. They are currently working on a third poetry collection, Living Line.

Jessica Kejun Xu is a Cantonese settler learning to make community around care and creative play on Turrbal and Yuggera Country, and the Eora Nation. Jess experiments with movement, writing, calligraphic and musical improvising to decompress chronic pains and reconnect with intuition after training in western classical flute. Her art mulls on dis/connections in diaspora, disability, and ways of knowing ourselves through culturally mediated movements of bodies, seasons, and time. They research to unravel intersectional, intergenerational contexts that shape migrant dreams, and listen for what it means to decolonise diasporic (be)longings on stolen land.

Editor: Daley Rangi
Digital Producer: Sonya Ishimnikova

line drawing of two people facing each other, arms touching in affection. One is pulling away but looking back, the other reaching out

Are we enough?
how do we build this enoughness?

Sorry -

everything I do feels
like a half-offering

wave

as steep as mud

- don’t be sorry

hum like underwater,
key click thock flail

I stop

enduring

suppressing

tolerating

copying

forcing

hiding

the word masking as a calligraphic drawing in the shape of a face, masking to fit neurotypical expressions and ways of being

The word imitating as a calligraphic drawing of a person, holding themself rigidly in imitation of others, wobbly at the feet

you should know what

The word comfort in flowing brush calligraphy. Line drawings of people lounging, laying within and standing on top of letters of the word

does to my body

hum sigh through unmasking

I burp and fart release
gas and I don’t need to tell
you FTP AWAWB
acceptance & resistance
centre this access intimacy

Floating figure of a person drawn in wide flowing brush strokes. Strong shoulders, flowing legs, like they’re levitating

I haven’t talked about this much
breathing into the night
like breathing into a vessel
humid hums low like a release
ends close to a breath … fuzzy…
I overheat when under the doona with you
what do you need?

Line drawing of 3 people next to each other, laying down with legs up or hunched over managing pain. 2 figures are laying down on massage balls and acupressure spikes

watching the sun rise
holding hands
through the prism of pain
hour to hour fluctuate day by day
breathing
into

Drawing of macadamia leaves and flowers, holding us in our pain - we look to this from bed, a reminder of Country and growth

tinny whistling atop breathy lows