Ask the Brindled: National Poetry Series

I.
Definitions of moʻo 1-3    
     Maunakea    
     About the effects of shedding skin    

     Welcome to the gut house    

     Eggs    

     He moʻo, he wahine    

     Kino    

     Moʻolelo is the theory    

     My grandma tells    

     Memory as missionary position    

     How to swallow a colonizer    

     Catalogue of gossip, warnings & other talk of moʻo, aka an ʻōiwi abecedarian    

     Don’t have sex with gods    

     When you say  “protestors” instead of “protectors”    

 II.
Definitions of moʻo 4-6    
     Iwi hilo means thigh bone means core of one’s being    
     Maui county fair    

     In search of a different ending    

          I. Summer with funeral & booze    

          II. Summer with funeral & playing house    

          III. Summer with funeral & 3 a.m.    

     Mercy    

     Ex is a verb    

     After she leaves you, femme    

     Lessons in quarantine    

     So sacred, so queer    

     Adze-shaped rain    

 III.
     Erasure triptych: ʻai    
     Sirens        out    

     Erasure triptych: aloha    

 IV.
Definitions of moʻo 7-8    
     Thirst traps    
     Myth bitch    

     Getting ready for work    

     For sisters who pray with fire    

     Dirtiest grand    

     The opposite of dispossession is not possession; it is connection    

     The ea of enough    

     Fire in Mākena    

     Recovery, Waikīkī    

     New patient form—medical history—creative option    

     Preparing Kaʻuiki    

     Basket    

     Shapeshifters banned, censored, or otherwise shit-listed, aka chosen family poem 
Notes

Mahalo 

Noʻu Revilla is the author of Ask the Brindled. She is an ʻOiwi (Native Hawaiian) queer poet and educator. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Poetry, Literary Hub, ANMLY, Beloit, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress. Her latest chapbook, Permission to Make Digging Sounds, was published in Effigies III in 2019, and she has performed throughout Hawaiʻi as well as Canada, Papua New Guinea, and the United Nations. She is an assistant professor at the University of Hawaiʻi-Manoa, where she teaches creative writing with an emphasis on ʻOiwi literature, spoken word, and decolonial poetics. Born and raised in Waiʻehu on the island of Maui, she currently lives and loves in the valley of Palolo on the island of Oʻahu.