Volume 5, Number 1 2023

PACIFIC ISLANDERS EDITION

John Dominis Holt

MANA

Not one voice
but many—
One voice is easily lost
in the electronic din of the air waves.

Not one arm
but many–
One arm alone
cannot awake the earth to green
in the torrid wastes of dusty drouth.

Not one dream for one alone
but many—
The dream of many moves
from troubled sleep to waking songs.

Not one song
for it is not enough
to cure these curious ills,
these torments of mind and body
which blight the earth.

Connections
cannot connect
disparate ends.

A steady throb
links ant to anthropoid,
and thin blades of grass
to towering koa trees
in their dampened paradise.

May the stars give us
the understanding of unison,
in which we all share mana
to endure the coming onslaughts.

Tamara Wong-Morrison

STRANGE SCENT

Hear the beating of the pahu
distant and warning.
Beware—a strange wave has washed upon the rocks
even the crabs run from their homes.
In the night it passed over shining black water, gliding—not
knowing where it came from
or where it’s going
An omnipresence—there.
Me, I tried to sleep under starless sky
but too dark
too strange
too still.
I feel I will never be the same again.

Imaikalani Kalahele

Chuck Souza

LAVA IN THEIR SOUL

Chuck Souza – guitar, vocals / Sam Henderson – guitar / Beau Leonidus – bass guitar Greg Kekipi -‘ukulele / Kevin Daley – drums / Creed Fernandez – congas, percussion Kurt Thompson – keyboards

Imaikalani Kalahele

John Dominis Holt

AUNTY’S ROCKS

I wondered Aunty
why you kept those rocks on the shelves
covered by a curtain?
Why you fed them brandy?
And why in the night
you cried out to the classical gods,
chanting in quiet tones
because of the nearness of neighbors?
I was frightened
awakening in the dark
to these incantations.

Where are the gods of old?
Why do you seek them?
Why not the Lord Jesus,
the Son of God,
who died for us
on that hill long ago?

Aunty
why do you wail
and form the weird tones
out of words so foreign
and unfriendly to a modern ear?

Why do you supplicate? Implore?!
Is it your jealousy of Kiliwehi,
whose beautiful voice
rises to the skies above the banyan
and the palm where you linger?
Kiliwehi,
Songbird of Hawai’i
she was called.

I once peeked
and saw three pōhaku on your shelves
with jiggers of Metaxis brandy
poured full in front of them.

Radioactivity made by your prayers
filled these rocks with evil powers:
a strange radiation of sorts
fissionable and lethal.
‘Unihipili was captured
and held in the mana of your invocations,
to be transformed into akua lele
awaiting their killing flights.

But Aunty
I also remember the time
in your living room
when you sat before a large calabash.
At the bottom
bits and pieces of Kiliwhehi’s possessions
lay quiet and compliant.
And though you would soon die
from the powerful rush
of carcinogenic unleashings in your liver,
you prayed continuously over that calabash
for the destruction of Kiliwehi.

Alas!
The ‘unihipili powers flew out
and chose you as their beloved victim.

All of us
were saddened by your death
as the whole town mourned—

And Kiliwehi
at your burial service
sang with such brilliance
and aching poignance,
before the heavy rains
fell in your honor
out of the sky.

Leialoha Apo Perkins

PLANTATION NON-SONG

Those years of lung-filling dust in Lahaina
of heat and humidity that induced
men and animals to lie down mid-afternoons
and sleep—between the mill’s lunch shift whistles—
were not great, but mediocre for most things
and superlative for doing or not doing anything
useful, ugly, or good. Just for staying out of trouble.
There was time and space for a child to grow up in
playing between scraggly hibiscus bushes,
and hopping over rutty roads
that smelled of five-day-old urine, all on one side
of the canefield tracks, ground once blanketed
with warrior dead and sorcerers’ bones.

At the shore, the white newcomers lived
crossing themselves at sunrise and sunset
in a paradise “discovered,” jubilating
as Captain Cook who also had found the unfound natives
and their unfound shore naked and ready for instant use.

Mill Camp’s
beginnings are beginnings
one may grow to respect if not honor
because they are a man’s beginnings.
But let’s not make sentiment
the coin for the cheap treatment
some got—and others enjoyed handing out.
Let’s call the fair, fair.

What may have been good, good enough
because it was there,
like space waiting for time to fill it up
(while we were looking elsewhere);
nevertheless, plantation worlds
enjoyed their own tenors:
ghettos of mind, slums of the heart.

Albert Wendt

THE KO’OLAU

1.

Since we moved into Mānoa I’ve not wanted to escape
the Ko’olau at the head of the valley
They rise as high as atua as profound as their bodies
They’ve been here since Pele fished these fecund islands
out of Her fire and gifted them the songs
of birth and lamentation.

Every day I stand on our front veranda
and on acid-free paper try and catch their constant changing
as the sun tattoos its face across their backs

Some mornings they turn into tongue-
less mist my pencil can’t voice or map
Some afternoons they swallow the dark rain
and dare me to record that on the page

What happens to them on a still and cloudless day?
Will I be able to sight Pele Who made them?
If I reach up into the sky’s head will I be able
to pull out the Ko’olau’s incendiary genealogy?

At night when I’m not alert they grow long limbs
and crawl down the slopes of my dreams and out
over the front veranda to the frightened stars

Yesterday Noel our neighbour’s nine-
year-old son came for the third day
and watched me drawing the Ko’olau
Don’t you get bored doing that? He asked
Not if your life depended on it! I replied
And realised I meant it

2.

There are other mountains in my life:
Vaea who turned to weeping stone as he waited
for his beloved Apaula to return and who now props
up the fading legend of Stevenson to his ‘wide and starry sky’
and reality-TV tourists hunting for treasure islands

Mauga-o-Fetu near the Fafā at Tufutatoe
at the end of the world where meticulous priests gathered
to unravel sunsets and the flights of stars that determine
our paths to Pulotu or into the unexplored
geography of the agaga

Taranaki Who witnessed Te Whiti’s fearless stand at Parihaka
against the settlers’ avaricious laws and guns
Who watched them being evicted and driven eventually
from their succulent lands but not from the defiant struggle
their descendants continue today forever until victory

3.

The Ko’olau watched the first people settle in the valley
The Kanaka Maoli planted their ancestor the Kalo
in the mud of the stream and swamps
and later in the terraced lo’i they constructed
Their ancestor fed on the valley’s black blood
They fed on the ancestor
and flourished for generations

Recently their heiau on the western slopes was restored
The restorers tried to trace the peoples’ descendants in the valley
They found none to bless the heiau’s re-opening
On a Saturday morning as immaculate as Pele’s mana
we stood in the heiau in their welcoming presence that stretched
across the valley and up into their mountains
where their kapa-wrapped bones are hidden

4.

The Ko’olau has seen it all
I too will go eventually
with my mountains wrapped up
in acid-free drawings that sing
of these glorious mountains
and the first Kanaka Maoli who named
and loved them forever

Michael McPherson

DOUBLE MAILE LEI

You are timid when I lift it
over your burning auburn hair,
twining two strands together
as if these leaves were lovers
inseparable by distance and time,
twin vines from a white mountain.
I chattered while your friend sat
stone faced and distracted across
the table, telling how these leaves
hold their scent even dry as dust,
but a frightened maître d’ in Portland
balked upon my entry—we don’t wear
leaves here, sir, he said, and gently
I conjured distant seas in naked calm,
deep as azure and steeped in centuries
of trade wind whispers in kukui groves,
a sound like singing until we find peace.
It might have been my best London suit,
pinstripes subtle as those golden strands
at your temples, or perhaps this caress
of far sirens may waive our entry then.
Give this to your mother, so her mountains
beyond her vast expanse of dancing light
may touch mine, fool who fears not gold
nor diamonds bright, for his heart is full
with tropic nights too warm for questions.
I dare not ask you where they go, chords
to carry their scent of Heaven when we rise.

Wayne Kaumualii Westlake

GRANDFATHER WAS A STRANGE MAN

my grandfather was a strange man:
an old-time intellectual, a german
runaway, steamship stowaway to
mexico then legged it to frisco
then freightshiped across the sea to
lahaina, maui. . . . i mean
my grandfather was a strange man;
he worked the sugar plantation
a luna, but not a brutal nazi like
so many—no i said
my grandfather was a strange man:
he married a hawaiian even, unheard
of then—a dirty hawaiian—a HEATHEN!
and he let me run around naked
in the Sun and insisted my hair grow
long and blond, like ‘gorgeous george’ . . .
my grandfather was a strange man:
he’d laugh a lot—just a baby we’d ride
the cane trains all over beautiful maui;
ah the good old days!—retired he’d listen
to the radio, news of his dying years—
his nose bled one day and wouldn’t stop—
he didn’t say much, smoked a lot
and died frosted white, like a neon light
in a hospital, somewhere in honolulu,
skin and bones, wasted—i took the phone
call from the hospital and knew and handed
the phone to my mother: i knew it first—
my grandpa died. . . .
my grandfather was a strange man:
at the funeral it was strange—
everyone was crying (no one knew him)
and i so young just stood there staring
at the gravemound and knew, ULTIMATELY
and FINALLY: i’d never see my grandpa
again—‘so this is where the long road
ends?’ too young, i learned the TRUTH . . .
my grandfather was a strange man:
i think about him by the stormy sea
twenty years later—still wearing his
old worn shirt—torn, ragged, threadbare—
held together with coconut leaf—
my grandfather was a strange man;
his old shirt still keeps me warm . . .

Imaikalani Kanahele

Dana Naone Hall

NIGHT SOUND

Waking at night from a dream of my father
dead even in the dream.
He ate handfuls of dust scooped from a fireplace
and we drew him to a mirror to show him,
show ourselves that he no longer had a reflection.
I see the heavy patterned curtains
on the windows of my childhood,
their color deepening into darkness.
Moonlight glows on my bed.
From the next room the sound of
my father grinding his teeth in sleep.

Craig Santos Perez

RINGS OF FIRE

Honolulu, Hawai’i

He host our daughter’s first birthday party
during the hottest April in history.

Outside, my dad grills meat over charcoal;
inside, my mom steams rice and roasts

vegetables. They’ve traveled from California
where drought carves trees into tinder—“Paradise

is burning.” When our daughter’s first fever spiked,
the doctor said, “It’s a sign she’s fighting infection.”

Bloodshed surges with global temperatures,
which know no borders. “If her fever doesn’t break,”

the doctor continued, “take her to the Emergency
Room.” Airstrikes detonate hospitals

in Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, South Sudan . . .
“When she crowned,” my wife said, “it felt like rings

of fire.” Volcanoes erupt along Pacific fault lines;
sweltering heatwaves scorch Australia;

forests in Indonesia are razed for palm oil plantations—
their ashes flock, like ghost birds, to our distant

rib cages. Still, I crave an unfiltered cigarette,
even though I quit years ago, and my breath

no longer smells like my grandpa’s overflowing ashtray—
his parched cough still punctures the black lungs

of cancer and denial. “If she struggles to breathe,”
the doctor advised, “give her an asthma inhaler.”

But tonight we sing, “Happy Birthday,” and blow
out the candles together. Smoke trembles

as if we all exhaled
the same flammable wish.

Donovan Kūhiō Colleps

KISSING THE OPELU

For my grandmother

I am water, only because you are the ocean.

We are here, only
because old leaves have been falling.

A mulching of memories folding
into buried hands.

The cliffs we learn to edge.
The tree trunk hollowed, humming.

I am a tongue, only because
you are the body planting stories with thumb.

Soil crumbs cling to your knees.
Small stacks of empty clay pots dreaming.

I am an air plant suspended, only
because you are the trunk I cling to.

I am the milky fish eye, only
because it’s your favorite.

Even the sound you make
when your lips kiss the opelu
socket is a mo‘olelo.

A slipper is lost in the yard.
A haku lei is chilling in the icebox.

I am a cup for feathers, only
because you want to fill the hours.

I am a turning wrist, only
because you left the hose on.

Heliconias are singing underwater.
Beetles are floating across the yard.

Craig Santos Perez

ginen SOUNDING LINES

remember just dad
tied an old tire to

a metal fence pole
so [we] could practice

pitching—o say can you hear
the hollow sound when

the baseball strikes
rubber—the rattling when

it strikes wire—or
that perfect sound—

speak english only—
when [we] strike the pole

through the center of—o
say can you remember

just little league—barrigada
“tigers”—black and gold

uniforms—red seams—
my brother played for father

duenas memorial high school
“friars”—maroon and gold

uniforms—to pledge allegiance—
[we] collected american

baseball cards and cheered
for the “bash brothers”

in “oakland”—near where
brian moved for college blue

skies—the coliseum was
an island—green and

gold uniforms—white
bases—[we] stand

to sing the national
anthem—o say

can you see
[us]—what follows

your flag?

Kalehua Kim

MEMORY SONNET

Although I have come back for the summer,
my father’s house has never been my home.
His silence, humid and thick as thunder,
hangs heavier than the sun sapped mangoes
outside my window, their dense, orange flesh
sweating sugar, needing conversation.
When I ask him what he remembers best
about meeting my mother, he smiles then,
revealing only one of his dimples,
and says, “We met at da bus company,”
Something so benign, something so simple,
I’m surprised when he goes on suddenly,
“She used to sing, yeah? Ho, da voice she got,
in da house, in my head, an in my haht.”

MY FATHER’S SONNET

All the drivahs on da buses knew yo maddah.
She worked da desk, yeah? Whea dey check in,
an she was attractive, so we knew her.
I remembah yo Uncle George, I remembah
him from City and Country, and I knew she
was George’s sistah. So was easy fo’ talk to her.
I wen ask her out fas kine, I nevah like nobody
go out wid her but me. I cannot remembah
whea we went, maybe bumbay we went fo’
drinks or someten’, was long time.
Yeah, she used to sing. All da time, me an
yo braddahs, would hea her. Bumbay, I couldn’t
tink fo’ her voice all ovah da place.
In da house, in my head, in my haht.

MY MOTHER’S SONNET

Your father said he wanted to be free.
The boys were pitching tents in the back yard,
setting down stakes, building kingdoms in trees.
You were there, wearing a green leotard,
princess slippers, with a tutu in hand.
He and I sat at the dining table
where I fidgeted with my wedding band,
where he rewrote our family fable.
I want to be free. I heard him say it
again and again in my mind – it took
me years to understand, then to admit
that marriage wasn’t like a story book,
an easy tale where the prince becomes king.
It’s a harmony I hope you can sing.

Brandy Nālani McDougall

WHAT A YOUNG, SINGLE MAKUAHINE FEEDS YOU

Hamburger Helper in every flavor, tuna casserole, spam casserole, spam and corn,
spam and green beans, spam sandwiches, vienna sausages, portuguese sausages, pork and beans, cooked corned beef, onions and rice,
cold corned beef, raw onions and poi, shoyu hot dog, sardines and onions, canned chili, with rice, Spaghetti O’s, with meatballs with rice, McNuggets, Cheeseburger Happy Meals, warm birthday cake straight from the microwave, Rice Krispie treat Easter Eggs with your name in frosting, Lucky Charms, Fruity Pebbles, Cocoa Pebbles, Campbell’s Tomato soup, Chicken Noodle and Chicken with stars, saimin with egg, fried egg sandwiches, fried bologna, fried bananas, fried pork chops, fried spam, and fried fish or dried fish from Uncle— no matter which Uncle— you eat whatever Uncle brings.

Mahealani Wendt

RESILIENCE OF THE RED LA’I

A Hawaiian Transplant

It’s not as though I want to kill you; I don’t.  Even if I wanted to, it seems I can’t.  No amount of not watering, no re-potting, not fertilizing, no transplanting, not nothing, can kill you.

It is February, 1969.  It is a cold winter morning at the corner of Fabens Road and Harry Hines Boulevard just outside of Dallas.  I am standing at the stop across Penter’s Drive-In, waiting for the 4:30 a.m. bus to Chapel Hill.  Ova Harlan lives there in a red brick house with central heating and A.C. in the summer.  She is a God-fearing Pentecostal who watches my girl while I’m at the Travelers Insurance Company, 16^th floor, First National Bank Building downtown.

I was lucky to get that job in the steno pool.  They started me at two-seventy-five a month and if I do good I’ll get a raise to three hundred next year.  They got efficiency experts come in and they’re real strict.  Being on time, no lollygagging or socializing, is number one.  I need this job to support me and the kids.

I often linger at Ova’s house when I go to pick up Lei after work.  It’s hard to go back out into that cold—I’ll never get used to it.  In the summer, it is an oven out there, and Ova don’t mind me hanging around too much.  At home we got one gas heater in the parlor and a ceiling fan we turn on summers.  They don’t help much.

I am holding Lei’s hand.  She is almost two.  She has got on the little red mittens that match her new winter coat.  She could do with a knit cap but I can’t afford one right now.

I got Kai in my arms, he’s six weeks old.  He don’t cry, don’t give no trouble.  He’s sleeping, bundled up good.  He has got on a warm flannel pajama sack, light blue with little yellow giraffe designs all over it.  It ties under the legs.  I got his diaper bag with six bottles of formula and a powder blue huggy bear slung over my shoulder.  Lei’s bag with her change of clothes and other stuff is over that shoulder too.  Lei somehow still manages to suck that mittened right thumb while clinging to Miss Dolly.

The air is white and shivery.  The ground crackles as we shift our feet in place to keep warm.  Lei has got white leggings on and little black shoes I bought on sale at Howard’s.

The bus is late and I’m worried about getting to work on time.  Me and the kids have been standing out here in the dark a good forty minutes.  Lei has begun whimpering she’s cold but I tell her to hush up.

The kids’ daddy got the Camaro.  He came home the other night and said if I didn’t get the hell out and take the kids with me he’d bring his girlfriend home and fuck her right there in our bed.

And furthermore, no way in hell was I getting the Camaro, even though he works right down the road at Roseland Landscape & Nursery.  He’s just talking crazy again but I did like he wanted, took the kids and got out.  His girlfriend’s name is Sara.  She’s in the peace movement and way smarter than me.

I’m far from home.  My first time, really.  Married out of high school and followed him to Texas.  Got no family here, no one to speak of.

I don’t dwell on troubles.  Main thing I gotta make sure I get myself to work on time, and I still gotta take another bus ride after dropping Lei off at Ova’s.  Gotta get clear across to Oak Cliff.  Reason I catch a bus clear over to Oak Cliff is Ova don’t watch babies.  It took awhile, but I found Miss Ella Hildreth, and she seems like someone I can trust with Kai.  You don’t want to be worrying if your kid is okay when you are at work.

Here comes the Chapel Hill bus at last!  I shift baby Kai so he is securely cradled in the crook of my left arm.  I adjust the bags over my shoulder and grab Lei’s left mittened hand.  All of a sudden she slips and falls, let’s go a loud wail.  I jerk her by the hand up off of that icy ground. “Get up!  Stop that crying!  She keeps it up and I give her a hard slap.  “Stop it!”

That’s when I notice the large gash under her right knee.  Her white leggings are soaked with blood.  Horrified, I see a large jagged shard of glass on the ground, bloodied remnant of a broken bottle I hadn’t noticed earlier.

The bus pulls up and I quickly hoist Lei onto my right shoulder.  We get on the bus.  I tell the startled driver and passengers within earshot she is fine.  We just need to get to where we’re going, is all.  My mind is racing trying to figure out what I’m going to do.  I feel like shit I yelled at her and slapped her but I can’t think about that now.  The bus driver looks uneasy but my voice is commanding and calm:  She’s fine.  I got it under control.  Just keep driving.  No cause for alarm.  No need to call anybody.  We’ll be fine.”

In full view of other bus passengers I reach into the diaper bag, pull one out and fashion a kind of tourniquet to staunch the bleeding.  Baby Kai stirs.  I pull out a bottle and feed him while whispering in Lei’s ear, “Mama’s sorry.  Mama’s sorry.  You’re going to be okay sweetie.  Don’t worry.  You’re going to be okay.”  Kai falls back asleep and I cradle the two, fighting back the tears.

It is a half-hour bus ride to Ova’s  Thankfully when I get there she immediately takes charge and sends me on my way.  I write the note authorizing her to get medical treatment for Lei and pass on the insurance card.  I change Kai’s diaper while Ova takes Lei to Methodist Hospital Emergency Room.

I am standing at the bus stop outside Ova’s  I got an hour and a half to get baby to Ella Hildreth’s in Oak Cliff.  I hope I make it to work on time.  Could mean my job.

At the emergency room Ova sees to it that Lei gets stitched up proper.  Like I told Lei, she’ll be fine.

Lehua Taitano

HEART, AS BLACK PHOEBE

Stream-side the meadow’s edge,
an open mouth
loops a script above the grass
tips.

A cursive most legible
dusktimes, or
when wet earth warms
to burst of hatch-
flitter.

An old god will say
bright pure radiant.

Hood of soot, the heart will say

persist persist.

Love is a dark calligraphy
brushed upon the sky.

Brandy Nālani McDougall

HOW I LEARNED TO WRITE MY NAME

It is 1981 in Kula,
and my father, cloudy and high on booze
and pakalolo, for all his love songs
of rain and mountain mist, is unable
to stay. My mother, unable to leave
him, showers during his frantic search
through her purse for money, clattering loose
change against house keys, for any green bill
with a face. As an afterthought, he turns,
concerned now with my witness, young eyes. Hunched
over the kitchen table, I scribble
nonsense. He bribes, “I’ll give you a dollar
if you don’t tell.” I won’t. But I pretend
not to hear him, going on with the scratch,
scrawling the illegible string of loops
I insist is real writing. He doesn’t
bother to yell. He has no time for it,
knows he must leave before the sound of warm
water, unsteady thumps against the tub
and her skin, stops.

I knew there were stories there, staring down at the coil of e’s.
I had just written—a bouncy ocean,
a black curly hair—that this was the start
of important work. At the paper’s top,
there was my name, full, each letter composed
of dots for me to connect for homework.
My finger shadowed each sharp corner, whooshed
over straight lines and curves, almost-circles
and space—slow and careful gestures before
the pencil’s touch. Then, holding the bitten
roll of yellow wood and lead, I pressed down
hard to make a mark. Sighing with each glide,
I worked, writing through the door’s dull thud
behind him when he left, right through the wash
of swallowed tears behind the bathroom walls.
There was only this thrilled, measured motion:
my young hands threading dots into letters,
the fullness of my name, its shape, shouting.

Christy Passion

HEALING

When you left
it was a drier, brighter summer
than I would have liked. Still,
a world.

I sleep uncomfortably
in the heat, in the light, nowhere
to shield myself from the normalness
of things—

a foam cup of lukewarm coffee,
in the sink one dish, one fork,
folded laundry not yet put away.

Time is sturdy here,
facts remain facts
and the beasts of my imagination slowly
retreat to their caves.

I catch myself waiting
for another storm, for the thunder,
for an unexpected hallelujah
that would make me shake
or at least blink
but everything goes on
telling me—no harm done.

Imaikalani Kalahele

Kristiana Kahakauwila

ELEGY

Still aglow after intimacy and each bright ring
interrupts a romantic scene. My bedmate
turns, pretends not to notice caller ID.
Am I interrupting? Is dinner on?
Your voice is practiced calm. My grandmother,
you say, gone at eighty-three, a good life,
comfortable in a ripe peach way. So I
search platitudes: at least she went at home,
in her sleep. Like she wanted, you agree,
though we both know she did not want to –
In protest of death your dad refuses
to eat, and your mom, prayerful, wants only
holy things, but you know the soft rustle
of bed sheets. I’m sorry, I say to you,
and my lover returns to bed, all sweet.
What I don’t say is: your cancer scares me.
Or, better her life than yours. Or, I want
only the good parts. Selfish as I am
I am cradling his face when you tell me
you still love me, and I know then all
that will come. What is grief if not protest?
What is life if not a body able
to return in grace, in apology?

Kalehua Kim

POLARITY

When he looks at her
he remembers her in the shower,
shampoo suds trailing down
her back, between her cheeks
to her inner thighs.
When she looks at him
she tastes cigarettes
and golden apples.
“You don’t talk like this with
your friends? He asks, meaning
her husband. “No,” she answers
quickly, “We agree on everything.”
He orders sweet onions,
she prefers salted pork.
They eat, tasting
only their breath.
As they walk into the
dying light of the city,
they put their lips together
to see what comes apart.

Chuck Souza

RABBIT ISLAND SUNRISE

Chuck Souza – guitar, vocals / Sam Henderson – guitar / Beau Leonidus – bass guitar Greg Kekipi -‘ukulele / Kevin Daley – drums / Mike Paulo – soprano sax / Creed Fernandez – congas, percussion / Kurt Thompson – keyboards

Leialoha Apo Perkins

THE SPECTRAL BRIDES OF HA’ATAFA: A PHANTASY

(For Kele who saw them and for Sarah who was there to see them too)

Singing of water, of waves breaking into curls rolling to light,
the spectral brides of Ha’atafa glide, wind surfing
over subterranean terraces
over mountainous reefs that glitter back
like black mirrors of sea.
The brides must win for bridegroom
any young man who sees.

Tacking landward, they swerve trailing spume veils
as they rise. They sing as to a lakalaka, a dance.
Their songs rake the chasms
the seaweed forests, sound tracked
to ancient bridal chambers
under the sea.
The sun at its meridian looks down, down, down.

A wind rises, then shifts, colluding past noon.
The brides mount to their horizons
for the waves of a lover-to-be.

He must surf from these bars, golden to eyes watching the sea.
He must know kava.
He must hear drums.
He must dance
as he drinks
entranced
by the pitch
by the fury
of white spectres
that are charmed brides of the sea.

Imaikalani Kalahele

Dana Naone Hall

GIRL WITH THE GREEN SKIRT

She walks down the road,
her green skirt floating around her knees.

The men she passes peel off their shirts
and jump into her wide green hem.
She keeps walking, her skirt
clear as the surface of a pond.

Now they hold their arms out from their sides
like the branches of a tree, but no one is fooled
when the birds fly past them and nest
in the green forest of her skirt.

Unaware of the hot wind swirling around
the cool skirt keeps going.
The men following behind are thirsty
for the water of crushed leaves.

Falling into the deep grass
they want to live with green forever.

Brandy Nālani McDougall

RED HIBISCUS IN THE RAIN

Though the red fire-flower shivers with each tickle
of water, her stigma hangs above her like a flare to catch
a pill of pollen in her mouth, by chance. You ask her why
and listen closely, as she begins the story of her birth—
from calyx to pistil, filament to corolla—opening the folds
of her thin-veined petals to reveal the light deep in her throat.

He nuku, he wai ka ’ai a ka lā’au.
0 ke akua ke komo, ’a’oe komo kanaka.

A chant of night falls from the clouds overhead and she closes,
drawing the fire inside her petals, out of reverence for the stars.

Imaikalani Kalahele

Kalehua Kim

MAKALI’I AND THE STARS THAT FOLLOWED

It was a net of stars she struggled to lift,
her belly ready to spill its light.

Her belly ready to spill its light
she tipped like a cup, ready for release.

She tipped like a cup, ready for release,
ready to see the crown of her child’s head.

Ready to see the crown of her child’s head,
like the cluster of stars she saw months before.

The cluster of stars she saw the months before
did not prepare her for the long, dark wait.

Not prepared for more longing or darkness,
She pushed until she broke open with light.

She pushed until her child broke into flight,
a net of stars she struggled to gift.

Albert Wendt

IN HER WAKE

I walk in her wake almost every morning and afternoon
along the Mānoa Valley
from home and back after work
In her slipstream shielded from the wind and the future
I walk in her perfume that changes from day to day
in the mornings with our backs to the Ko’olau
in the afternoons heading into the last light as it slithers
across the range into the west

She struts at a pace my bad left knee
and inclination won’t allow me to keep up with
And when I complain she says You just hate a woman
walking ahead of you
No. I hate talking to the back of your head

I’m the Atua of Thunder she reminds me
when my pretensions as a Samoan aristocrat get out of hand
So kill my enemies for me I demand
Okay I’ll send storms and lightning
To drown and cinderise them
Do it now I beg
I can’t I’ve got too much breeding to act like that
(How do your cure contradictions like hers?)

She loves Bob Dylan the Prophet of Bourgeois Doom
And this morning I swam in his lyrics as she marched ahead singing:
Sweet Melinda the peasants call her the goddess of gloom
She speaks good English
And she invites you up into her room
And you’re so kind
And careful not go go to her too soon
And she steals your voice
And leaves you howling at the moon . . .

Yes for over a year I’ve cruised in her perfumed slipstream
utterly protected from threats
She’ll take the first shot or hit in an ambush
And if a car or bike runs headlong into us
my Atua of Thunder with the aristocratic breeding
will sacrifice her body to save me

By the way she nearly always wears her favourite red sandals
as she like Star Trek forges boldly ahead singing Dylan songs
and me wanting to howl at the Hawaiian moon

Wayne Kaumualii Westlake

TWO BAMBOOS

Haunani-Kay Trask

LOVE BETWEEN THE TWO OF US

1.

because I thought the haole
never admit wrong
without bitterness
and guilt

without attacking us
for uncovering them

I didn’t believe you

I thought you were star-crossed
a Shakespearean figure
of ridiculous posturing

you know, to be or not to be
the missionary rescue team
about to save
a foul, “primitive’ soul

with murder
in its flesh

11.

We all know haole “love”
bounded by race
and power and the heavy
fist of lust

(missionaries came
to save
by taking)

how could I possibly believe?
why should any Hawaiian believe?

but it is a year
and I am stunned
by your humility
your sorrow for my people

your chosen separation
from that which is haole

I wonder at the resolve
in your clear blue eye

111.

do you understand
the nature of this war?

Imaikalani Kalahele

Albert Wendt

SHE DREAMS

Nearly always she remembers her dreams vividly
At breakfast this morning she recalled how she was flying
through a noiseless storm across the Straits for Ruapuke and her father
who was sitting on his grave in their whānau urupā wearing a cloak of raindrops
and she looked down and back at her paddling feet
and saw she wasn’t wearing her favourite red sandals
She stopped in mid-flight in mid-storm and called Alapati get me my saviours!
Woke and didn’t understand why she’d called them that

It’s been about thirteen years and that makes you the man
I’ve stayed the longest with she declared unexpectedly
as we cleared the breakfast dishes
To her such declarations are so obvious and like raindrops
you can flick easily off a duck’s back
but for me it will stay a nit burrowing permanently into my skin
I won’t understand why

If I tell her that she’ll probably say You love guilt too much
You read too much into things and need someone to blame
So shall I blame her for staying thirteen years and plus?
For not wearing her saviours and reaching her dead father
who would have taken off his fabulous cloak of rain and draped it around her?
Shall I blame her for not having me when we were young
and we could have been together much longer?

Or shall I as usual just let it pass
content that I am blessed to be with her
and in her dreams one day she and I will fly together
through the voiceless storm to Ruapuke and her waiting father?
She will be wearing her saviours
and we will arrive safely

Imaikalani Kalahele

John Dominis Holt

THE POOL

It was perhaps as large as a good-sized house. It tended to be round in shape. At the far southern end of Kawela Bay, it sat open to the wind and sun. Scattered clumps of
coconut grew around it, splashing shade with the look of Rorschach inkblots here and there at the edges of the water.
Freshwater fed into it from underground arteries, blended with warmer water pushed in by the tide from the sea through a volcanic umbilical cord. “The lagoon,” as we called it, had a definitive link to the sea, being joined as it was by virtue of this unique tubular connection.
We were always afraid of the pool. For one thing it was alleged to be so deep as to be way beyond anyone’s imagination–like the idea of endless space to the universe or
the unending possibilities of time. Its dark blue-green waters were testament to the fact of the pool being deep according to our elders. We accepted their calculation,
but not entirely. It was deep to be sure, but not depthless.

Within the pool, huge ulua, a local variety of pompano or crevalle, would suddenly appear in ravenous groups of three or four, chasing mullet in from the sea. Once in
the confines of this small body of water the mullet were no match for the larger, carnivorous predators. Ulua could grow to the size of three or four feet and weigh nearly a hundred pounds. The mullet feasts by ulua in the pool were wild and unpleasant scenes. We would watch as children, both enthralled and frightened, as mullet leaped for their lives in glittering silvery schools of forty or fifty fish, some to fall with deadly precision into the jaws of the larger fish. The waters swirled then and sometimes became bloody. The old folks said this would attract sharks. They would wait at the opening of the tube in the ocean to prey on the ulua, whose bellies were now fat from feasting on mullet. These tumultuous invasions were not frequent, but they were reason enough to keep us from swimming in “the lagoon.

Perhaps most fearful to us, were the tales we heard offered by assorted adults that a goddess of ancient times inhabited these strange blue-green waters. Some knew her
name and mentioned it. I have forgotten what it was. She was said to be a creature of unearthly beauty, a queen of the Polynesian spirit world, who revealed herself at
times in the forms of great strands of limu, a seaweed, of which a special variety grew only in brackish water; her appearance depending on tides, the moon, winds, and
certain cosmic manifestations we could not completely understand because they were mentioned in Hawaiian.

I wandered for hours in the area of the pool and on the reefs nearby, with an ancient bearded sage, who was the caretaker of our family’s country retreat at Kawela.
His hut of clapboard and corrugated roofing sat near an old ku’ula, a fisherman’s shrine, half-hidden under some hau bushes. His family had been fishermen from time
immemorial. Some of his relatives lived a short distance down the coast toward Waimea Bay. Infrequent visits were made upon the old man by these ‘ohana; usually three or four young men came to consult him about fishing. His knowledge of the North Shore and its inhabitants in the sea was vast. Once or twice a year he paid a ritual visit to his family’s home down down the coast. Standing in its tiny lawn surrounded by taro patches, the little house was sheltered at the front by clumps of coconut and hala trees.

Back at Kawela, he spent hours explaining in Hawaiian, and in his own unique use of pidgin, the lore of the region, mentioning with distaste his wine drinking nephews.
I was only four or five years of age at the time. Much of his old world ramblings are now lost to me. But I do remember him mentioning that the sea entrance to the pool
was too deep for him to take me to it. He was too old now to dive to those depths. He was still able though, to secretly lead me to the ku’ula, a built-up rock shrine,
round in shape, where we took small reef fish and crustacea we had speared. We would pray; the old man in Hawaiian, I in a mixture of the old native tongue and English. It was now being impressed upon us that we must speak perfect English. The use of Hawaiian was discouraged. After prayers we would leave offerings on the ku’ula walls and walk to the pool, where more prayers were said and the remaining bits of fish thrown in as offerings to the beautiful goddess.

All these activities fell within a definite framework of time and circumstance. These were not helter-skelter rituals. I obeyed without question and I declared it untrue
when confronted by my mother–whose father, a half-white, had lived for years as a recluse in the native style in ‘Iao Valley–that the old man of Kawela was teaching me
pagan ways.

In horror one day I heard the old man say ‘hemo ia ‘oe kou lole–take off your clothes,” which consisted of a pair of chopped-off dungarees. “Hemo ia ‘oe kou lole e holo ‘oe
a i’a i ka luawai–take off your clothes and swim like a fish across the pool.” My body froze and goose bumps formed everywhere on my skin. “‘Awiwi–hurry.” I stood in
sullen defiance, thinking: he is an old man, a servant. He cannot order me to do anything–anything. “‘Au, keiki, ‘au!–Swim, child, swim! Do not be afraid. They are
with us!” I remained motionless. “Aue, he aha keia keiki kane? He kaikamahine pu’iwa paha?–What is this child? A frightened girl?”

Thoughts came to me of past fishing expeditions when I clung to the old man’s back as he dove into holes filled with lobsters and certain crabs. He would choose as time
allowed, pluck them from the coral walls, hand me two. Then, I could cling to him with only the use of my legs. In time I learned to rise to the surface alone, clinging
with all my might to the two lobsters the old man would hand to me. What excitement the first of these expeditions created! I leaped and danced around the crawling catch.
We went down for another take. Again two were brought up. On the reef above they were crushed, one then left as an offering on the ku’ula walls, the other fed to the akua in the pool. I was very young then and wild with joy.

There were other days when he took me to great caverns swarming with fish of such brilliant colors you were nearly blinded by the reds, yellows, greens, blues and stripes.
Above on the reef he would point them out to me. Patiently he named them, these reef fish, aglow in cavern waters: the lau’ipala; the manini; the uhu; the ‘ala’ihi;
the kihikihi with its black, yellow and white stripes; the humuhumu with its blue throat patch and vibrant yellow and red fins.

On one very special day, a sacred day in his life and mine as well–for I was linked to the family gods, the ‘aumakua–he took me, clinging to his back, to the vast sandy places under the sharp lava edges, on the north shore of O’ahu, where the great sharks lazed in the light of day. Breaks in the lava walls sent shafts of light to the sandy ocean floors and there we could see the sometimes-dreaded monsters rolling from side to side in harmless, peaceful rest. Shooting up to the surface, the old man would breathlessly tell me the names of this or that shark–names given them by his contemporaries. “Why names?” I would ask wonderingly. “Are they not our parents, our guardians–our ‘aumakua? Did you not see the old chief covered with limu and barnacles? He is the chief, the heir of Kamohoali’i. I used to feed him myself and clean the ‘opala from his eyes. Now a younger member of my clan does that.” I could not absorb these calm, reassuring concerns of denizens I had been taught to dread. But had I not been down in their resting place, close enough to see yellow eyes, to almost feel the roughness of their skin scraping like sandpaper across my arms? My dreams were wild for several nights and my parents, worried, held a few conferences with the old man. He was chastened, but at my insistence we went several times more to the holes under coral ledges to see the ‘aumakua lazing in the daytime hours.

And now, frozen at the edge of the green pool, I looked annoyingly at this magnificent relic of a Hawai’i that had long vanished. I loved him. There was no question I loved him deeply. Ours was a special kind of love of a man for a child. I was blond-haired. Exposed for weeks to the summer sun when we made long stays at Kawela, I became almost platnium blond. The old man was bearded, tall and thin, still muscular. He was pure Hawaiian. Blond though my hair might be and my skin fair, I was nonetheless three-eights Hawaiian. I think this captured the old man’s fancy–often he would say to me in pidgin, “You one haole boy, yet you one Hawaiian. I know you Hawaiian–you mama hapa haole, you papa hapa haole. How come you so white? You hair ke’oke’o?” He would laugh, draw me close to him and rub his scruffy beard against my face as though in doing this he would rub some of his brownness off and ink forever the dark rich tones of a calabash into my pale skin. It was love that finally led me to loosen the buttons of my shorts and kick them off and race plunging into the green pool. I swam with all the speed I could and reached in what seemed a very long time the opposite side. When I turned around, the old man was bent over with laughter. I had never seen him laugh with such gustatory abandon. “Look you mea li’ili’i. All dry up. Like one laho poka’oka’o–like an old man’s balls and penis. No can see now.” He pointed and made fun of my privates, shrivelled from a combination of cold water and fear. I turned away from him and raced home, naked.

Four days later I walked past the pool, across the sharp lava flats to the old man’s hut. Flies buzzed in legion. The stench was unbearable. I opened the door.
Lying face up and straight across his little bed, the old man lay in the first stages of putrefaction. Sometime during my absence the old man had died. At midday?
In the cool of the night? In the late afternoon, the time of lengthening shadows and the gathering of the brilliant array of gold-orange and red off the coast of Ka’ena
to the south facing the sea of Kanaloa? When did the old man die? Why did he die? Tears begain to stream down my cheeks. I shut the door of the shack and went to sit in the shade of the hau branches near the ku’ula–my heart was pounding so I could hardly breathe. What should I do? Tears continued to roll in little salty rivulets down my cheeks. I could taste the moisture when it entered my mouth at the corners of my lips. What should I do? Some instinct compelled me not to go home and tell my family of the death of the old man and the putrefaction that filled the cottage. Perhaps I was too stunned–perhaps it was perversity.

The family was gathering for a large weekend revel. Aunts, uncles, cousins–all the generations coming together. Usually I enjoyed these congregations of the family.
There would be masses of food, music, games and great lau hala mats spread on the lawn near the sandy beach. Someone would make a bonfire and the talk would begin. I would sit at the edges of the inner circle of elders as they ruminated on past events. Old chiefs, kings, queens, great house parties–scandals and gossip of one sort
of another would billow up from the central core of adults and leap into the air like flames. I took in the heat of this talk and greedily absorbed my heritage for they
spoke of family members and their circles of friends, mostly people from royalist families, the Hawaiian and part-Hawaiian aristocracy during the last days of the
Monarchy. I heard of this carriage or that barouche or landau, this house or that garden, this beautiful woman in love with so-and-so, or that abiding “good and patient” soul whose handsome husband dashed about town in a splendid uniform, lavishing on his paramour a beautiful house, a carriage and team, and flowing silk holokus fitted finely to her ample figure. O, the tales that steamed up from those gatherings on lau hala mats on the shores of Kawela!

One of my great-aunts, an aberration of sorts, came once in a while for the weekend. She brought a paid companion and her Hawaiian maid. She looked like Ethel Barrymore and talked with an English accent. Her gossip was spicy, often vicious, and I loved it. She fascinated me as caged baboons fascinate some people who go to zoos. She was also forbidding. I thought she had strange powers. Often the old man had joined us during these family gatherings, and I would sit on his lap until I fell asleep. There was something of great warmth and unforgettable charm in these gatherings. Even as the talk raged over romances, land dealings and money transactions long passed, I enjoyed hearing about them and loved everyone there, particularly those who talked. There was an immense feeling of comfort and safety, of lovingness for me on those long nights of talk.

But now under the hau branches I scorned my family. I hated them. I held them responsible, for some unknown reason–a child’s special reason I suppose; inexplicable
and slightly irrational. I decided not to tell them of the old man’s death but to run down the path along the beach to the house where some of his relatives lived. I
would tell them. They must rescue him from his rotting state; they must take him from the tomb of his stench-filled shack. I ran down along the beach, sometimes taking
the path pressed into winding shape from human use in the middle of grass and pohuehue vines. The men were at home, mending fish nets. This was a good sign. I ran to the rickety steps leading upward to the porch where they sat working at their nets. “The old man is dead,” I said forcefully. One of the young men looked down at me. “Make?” “Yes, he’s make. His body is stink. He make long time.” They put down their mending tools and came together at the top of the stairs. “How you know?” one of them asked. “We just came back from Punalu’u I went to the old man’s house. I saw plenny flies. I open the door and see him covered with flies. It was steenk.” I spoke partly in pidgin to give greater credibility to my message. They fussed around, called into the house, held a brief conference and faced me again. “You wen’ tell anybody?”
“No, nobody.” The four men took the path at a run.

I was under the hau bushes, catching my breath, when they flew past me heading back to their house. I sat for what seemed like hours in the shade of the hau. My sister appeared at the side of the pool. I ran to fend her off. She caught the stench from the shack. “Something stinks.” “The old man has fish drying outside his shack.” “Where is he?” “Down on the reef fishing.” “When are you coming home?” “Pretty soon.” “Mamma is looking for you–Uncle Willson is here with those brats,” she referred to his adopted grandchildren. Uncle Willson was a grand old relic. Something quite unreal. He was brimming always with stories of the past. “Aunt Emily has arrived with Miss Rhodes and that other one,” my sister added, alluding to the maid whom she hated. The cottages would be bulging and perhaps tents would be set up for the servants. My sister swung around abruptly and took the path back to our cottage. She was always purposeful in her movements. “Tell Mamma I’ll be home soon and kiss Uncle Willson and Aunt Emily for me.” “Don’t stay too long. You’ll get sunburned.”

I walked past the pool. It seemed purer in its color today. Deep blue, deep green. I was crying again. The stench filled the air with a stronger, punishing aroma as the sun rose high and began the afternoon descent beyond Ka’ena Point. I walked along the reef; the tide was rising. I peeked into holes the old man had shown me, watched idly the masses of fish swimming in joyous aimlessness it seemed. What ruled their lives? There was life and death among them. They were continually in danger of being devoured by larger fish. Some grew old and died, I suppose, they die of old age. I looked back at the shack and shook my fists. The old man’s nephews had returned with gleaming cans. They poured the liquid from them all around the little shack. I rushed back to the hau bushes as two of them threw lighted torches of newspaper at different spots. Soon the shack was in flames which leaped into the sky; as the dry wood caught fire, it crackled furiously. The flies buzzed at a distance from the blaze as though waiting for it to die down. The heat was intense. The smell of burning rotting flesh unbearable. I ran from the hau bushes toward the pool. One of the men saw me and yelled, “Go home, boy! Go home!” “Git da hell outa heah, you goddam haole!” another one shouted. I was angry and stunned in not being accepted
as Hawaiian by the old man’s nephews.

I ran around the pool at the side we seldom crossed. My family was massing nearby to watch the fiery spectacle. “What’s happening, son?” my father asked with more
than usual kindness. I ran to my mother and hugged her thighs. “The old man is dead. I found him. He was stinking. I ran down to tell his family.” “And now the
bastards are burning him up,” my father said. “It’s against the law.” Aunt Emily had arrived on the arms of her companion and maid. Her handsome face pointed its
powerful features to the center of the burning mass. “What is happening? she asked in Hawaiian. “Our caretaker died. Been dead several days. The boy found him.”
“What are they doing?” “It’s illegal. They’re cremating him without going through the usual procedures.” Aunt Emily blasted forth with a number of her original
and unrepeatable castigations. Everyone listened. They were gems of Hawaiian metaphor.

Uncle Willson and his man servant arrived. “The poor old bastard finally died. He was the best fisherman of these parts in his younger days. No one could beat him.
As a boy he was chosen to go down to the caverns and select the shark to be taken to use for the making of drums. His family were fishermen. One branch was famed as
kahunas. He was a marvel in his day.” “But Willy,” Aunt Emily was saying in a commanding tone. “Those brutes are burning his body. The boy here says it was rotten. He’d been dead for several days. The whole thing’s a matter for the Board of Health authorities. The police should be called.” “No, no! I screamed.

“Emily dear,” Great Uncle Willson intervened. “He is one of us. His ‘ohana, those young men are a part of us. Leave them alone. They are doing what they think best.”
I had gone from my mother to my nurse Kulia, a round, happy, sweet-smelling Hawaiian woman. “No cry, baby. No cry. We gotta die sometime. Da ole man was real old.” “Not that old,” I whimpered. Aunt Emily cast one of her iciest looks at me. “Stop that snivelling! Stop it this instant! What utter foolishness to cry that way
over a dirty, bearded old drunk!” She turned to my mother. “This child was allowed to be too much with that old brute. I think his attachment was quite unnatural–quite unnatural.” “Another one of your theories, Aunt Emily?” my mother snapped. “Not a thing but good common sense. Look at him clinging to Kulia and whimpering like a girl.” Kulia took me away. We walked on the beach. How I hated Aunt Emily’s Ethel Barrymore profile and her English accent.

Late that day, in the early evening, the old man’s nephews came back and carried off his charred remains in the empty cans of kerosene. No one ever found out what
they did with them.

When did the old man die? Why did he die? This I will never know. We called him Bobada, but I remember from something Great Uncle Willson said on the night the shack was burned that Bobada’s real name was Pali Kapihe.

Carl Pao

Michael McPherson

MALAMA

On the Puna coast, near the easternmost tip of
the island Hawaii, in a grove of tall ironwoods
planted early in this century stands a lava and
mortar marker, similar in shape and height to older,
mortarless markers found on trails which cross the
flanks of Kilauea Volcano, and bearing this
inscription:

MACKENZIE PARK
IN MEMORY OF
FOREST RANGER A.J.W. MACKENZIE
OCTOBER 1, 1917 – June 28, 1938

1

What angry ghosts are these
that roam the salt washed
honeycomb of corridors
through the belly of the earth,
fingering outward and down for miles
from the sea to the heart of the mountain?
Who can sleep in this grove
in the broken night, a windy
cacophony of flutes and drums,
and grinding of stones deep in the belly,
the ground trembling
as the heartbeat shifts,
and chants of the procession
as they mark again the passing of their king—

Is it any wonder then
that the campers
often in their haste
leave food and gear behind?

And from where comes
this orange glowing light
somewhere upward and ahead, around
the endlessly rounded corner in the corridor
of the dream?

The ranger slept here, long ago.
Alone he rode the two days down
from his home at Kilauea. He planted trees
in the days, trees which frame the king’s highway,
labor of prisoners in late Hawaiian times,’
and at night he lay alone by his fire
and listening to the stories on the wind
and rumblings in the earth’s belly
he was content, and slept
dreaming the warm belly of the woman
in the orange glow
from the heart of the black mountain.

2

At Kapoho the field zippered open
like the incision of a great invisible knife
and buried the town. East the blood of the land
ran burning to the sea, and covered all
but the little kuleana where an old woman
wandering alone in that darkest of nights
had found food and warmth and shelter, and today
we see it surrounded on three sides,
the tiny house and corral guarded by silent stone.

3

Mr. Mackenzie lost his life while on duty. He had
stopped his car, loaded with young trees, on a hill
to allow the motor to cool. The brake gave way,
and the vehicle started backing up. Mr. Mackenzie
reached inside for the hand brake but the car kept
moving faster. It struck a rut in the road, and Mr.
Mackenzie in turn was struck a severe blow,
apparently by the door handle, in the region of the
heart which proved instantly fatal. The car righted
itself in a few feet and stopped.

—Hilo Tribune Herald April 20, 1953

The ranger fell in the forest of Waiohinu,
the shining water. Whether by the door handle
or the hand of a man he knew is not for us
to understand, Brooks’s story remains,
told and retold, as when a fountain
for the ranger’s wife was dedicated in the park
and an account in the local paper referred
to the “freak accident.”

Whether it was then the cavern’s roof collapsed, and the ironwoods
rerooted to the floor
is not recorded either. But no one stays
all night in the park
on a new moon
and talks about it. By moonlight
a pistol is handy, as then the murderous living
stalk their prey in favorable isolation,
as in the killing of the young physician; the malice
of an apparently motiveless crime. But in darkness,
Puna darkness, a gun is nothing. Among shadows
of the corridors of stone
a man’s only weapon is his silence.

4

The sun on these sea cliffs
is the first to reach Hawaii, garland
of islands growing eastward into its rays
How bright the sun dances on this deep, deep sea,
and shines, too, on the stone monuments
to the two fallen fishermen whose lives were lost
where the blue water meets the smooth black stone,
whose bodies were swept into dark tunnels
underground, their bones now hidden in secret caves
like the old alii. So much death,
so much blood
is a part of this place—
its silence
at morning.
The wind in the ironwoods is hushed,
ghostly,
like our footsteps in the thick needles
under the trees.

5

What angry ghosts are they
that cannot sleep in such deep silence?
Do they serve the woman of the mountain
whose rage is legend
whose love is kindness to strangers
in strange, dark places? Whose blood
is stone, whose orange light glows
in blackness, black heat
glowing orange
in the spiral corridor
of the dream
dreaming heart of the mountain.

Carl Pao

Christy Passion

CRABBING AT THE OLD TRAIN TRACKS

I. K. Kaya’s Fishing Supplies

Smell of dust and old rain when you enter,
the filtered sunlight through the filmy windows up top
touching the bamboo poles, nylon nets, and wood trimmed
glass case filled with metallic lures and pink glitter squids
shimmering desire; everything as it always is.
I am here with Papa, his tanned arm outstretched
over the counter to Mr. Kaya’s, whose face
is all numbers and books, but his knuckles
are square and his palms are calloused;
they know hard work. The tin cans stripped of their labels
(were they asparagus? maybe tomatoes?)
line the edge of the aisles filled with small lead weights
and blunt spindles. Hanging on the wall
the cotton string crabbing nets we came for
patient and plain, like Pop’s gray Kangol
hanging next to the front door.
My hands run over all the different textures
carelessly I slide my feet into rubber-soled tabis;
while I half listen to the men share their truths
about fish and family. There is no need and busy here,
just a slow belonging among the Penn reels and glass floaters
centered, unopened.

II. Bait

The butchers are at home, still asleep;
the hooks for the duck and char siu empty, yet
the fish stalls are already lit, being stocked
by lean men in rubber boots carrying
soggy cardboard boxes on their shoulders
hustling in the early morning simmer.

Buckets of ice are poured onto steel tables
for the whiskered weke and wide-eyed menpachi,
each fish neatly lined up with the next
like iridescent red-bellied dominoes.
A trough of tight-lipped Manila clams
proves irresistible to touch—
Papa motions for me to hurry along
so I let them roll from my palm
back to their family, their difficulties.
He calls out to the old Chinese man
smoking at the register, counting our coins.
Assok get aku head?
Get, you like see?

Fish heads, heads as big as mine,
with their purple red lungs trailing
like party streamers, are held up for approval—
I clap as they are tossed into our plastic bucket,
lean over them to take in the blood smell,
the torpedo shape of their platinum heads,
tiny hooked teeth just inside the border of their mouths
agape, seemingly mid-prayer, their last fish words
not known to me. Bright gloss of their gelid eyes
glinting under the fluorescent lighting
fresh like the morning star, promising.

III. Old Train Tracks

The blue Nova kicks up the dry dirt no matter
how slowly we pull in, but no one makes the effort to go as far
as the old train tracks, so we don’t have to apologize.
We unload under the misplaced monkeypod tree,
lay the net flat, untangling the string from the floaters
without much talk; each tug and twist familiar, devout
and on the best of days, it stays mostly quiet
once the nets are cast then settled into the chamoised silt layers.
Julie’s tangerine bikini top flashes taut and uncompromising—
she sets up with the good beach chair a fair distance
from the bait bucket and its mob of flies.
Pop sequesters himself under the sparse shade of thorny kiawe
holding his transistor radio against his right ear and cheek.
The sticky silver knob rolls between a talk show
touting DMSO and Frank Sinatra. I keep to the middle
balancing on the last two tracks laying on the rotted wood,
click my tongue against the roof of my mouth
tasting metal in the noonday haze, waiting.
The Pacific is not beautiful here, from the land to its mouth
there is no subtle transition. Unnatural angular rocks
form the torn shoreline once heralding a red train that carried
the Queen and her entourage. It is brown here, grubbed,
a blemish of crippled waves. When I look out at her,
unending blue with white lashes blinking at the sun,
I pity these choked off inlets, still connected
but wanting to be forgotten, like widows at a bridal shower.
There is no urgency here, no desire for ascent:
Julie’s Teen Beat, her Farrah Fawcett hair, the sound of Pop
pissing behind the Nova, his white undershirt slack,
the water from the melted ice in the Igloo flecked with dirt
and suicidal gnats as I splash it against my neck.
we are not beautiful Hawaiians here.

IV. The Pull

It’s time
the only mistake now is stopping;
once the cord is touched, pull with the chest twist at the waist—
maybe it’ll be another monster like the six-pound beast
from two summers ago, pulled up right here
defiant, cutting through the net with his black striped claw

eyes on the eddy, there’s the orange floater
swaying towards the gray surface, then the metal rim—
maybe it’ll be blue crabs, soft shelled, Mama’s favorite,
newspaper spread out over the counter first then
the thwack of the butcher’s knife splitting them in two

the water’s letting go, hands keep gliding
as the cord cuts into the palm
maybe there’s nothing, that’s part of it too;
sometimes nothing’s all there is. On those days
sweat and stagnant water stink lingers on the ride home.
Nothing’s quiet as church, uncomfortable as tight shoes

Julie’s come over, gloves on, bucket in hand, arcing against
a sudden gust, her skin bright as copper on ash
Pop’s positioned on the ledge
looking into the unseeable, turns back smiling,
so I lock my legs, pull with all I got knowing
we’ll make do with whatever’s given to us.

Tamara Wong-Morrison

ALOHA IS ENDANGERED

They are counting whales
And letting loose baby turtles
Tracking monk seals
And planting only native plants

Who’s counting how many Hawaiians left?

How many Hawaiians still living off the land
Pulling ahis from the sea
Planting kalo, pounding poi?

Hard for live Hawaiian these days
Cannot hunt pig, cannot eat turtles
The kuahiwis are Nature Conservancies
Conspiracies to keep us away

More bettah shop Costco
Buy Spam, get food stamps
Collect Worst-fare
Give up, kill fight.

Imaikalani Kalahele

Dana Naone Hall

LOOKING FOR SIGNS

Aunty Alice said it first
there had been ho’ailona
ever since we took up
trying to keep the old road
from being closed in Makena
on the island where Maui
caught the sun in his rope.
The foreign owners of a half built
hotel don’t want their guests
to taste the dust
of our ancestors in the road.
They want them to step
from the bright green clash
of hotel grass to sandy beach
and the moon shining on a rocky coast.
The last hukilau in that place
was ten years ago,
but people still remember
the taste of the fish and the limu
that they gathered on the shore.
When tutu gets sick
the only thing that brings her back
is the taste of the ocean
in soup made from the small
black eyes of the pipihi.
In her dreams opihi
are growing fat on the rocks.
She is old and small now
in her bed above the blue ocean
wrapped in the veil of her dream
like the uhu asleep
after a day of grinding coral into sand.
It was at this house one Sunday
that relatives who stayed home from church
saw a cloud of dragonflies appear
over the ocean and fly through the windows.
Higher up the mountain someone else
dreamed of seeing Pele’s canoe
on the water the red sail of Honua’ula
coming toward land.
One weekend the family slept
at another beach along the old road—
the old road that is the old trail.
Uncle Charley took us all to the heiau
mauka of the beach.
From the beginning he has said
the road will not be closed.
When we came back,
Ed, one of the boys from Hana,
was standing in the shallow water
sending the sound of the conch shell
and the winding breath of the nose flute
across the channel to Kaho’olawe
through the ear of Molokini.
Later, we listened
to Uncle Harry joke with the kupuna.
Tutu was there and she stayed
all night sleeping in the sand
with the ‘aumakua all around.
The mo’o clucked in the kiawe,
while pueo flew through the dark
cutting across the path
of the falling stars,
and mano ate all the fish but one
in the net that Leslie laid.
As for us,
what is our connection to Makena?
You pointed out that we live on
one of three great rifts out of which
lava poured in ages past
to form the mysterious beauty of Haleakala.
Two gaps press in on the rim of the mountain
like a pitcher with two spouts.
Ko’olau separates us from Hana
and Kaupo divides Hana and Makena,
but there is no gap between us
and Makena lying at the bottom of
the youngest riff, where the
sweet potato vines covered the ground.
This morning, coming back along the coast,
on our side of the island
where the road bends at Ho’okipa,
I saw a cloud shaped kike a pyramid
and a car driving out of the sun.

Carl Pao

Kristiana Kahakauwila

LET US BE ANTIBODIES

In one of my earliest memories I am reaching upward, waiting to be lifted onto my father’s shoulders. We are strolling 2nd Street, a pavilion of shops and restaurants near our house in Long Beach, California, en route to frozen yogurt. Two vanilla cones: rainbow sprinkles for me, chocolate for him.

This is our weekend routine: Saturday afternoons our escape. My mother is the type to shop at health food stores even before that was a thing, to have banned white rice and cured meats from the house. No candy. No chocolate. Saturdays with my dad are different. We are a team—a team whose sport is eating frozen yogurt.

There are those Saturdays he cannot lift me atop his shoulders. The handful when he cannot lift himself out of bed. On those days his breathing is labored, the act of inhalation exhausting. My father is a severe asthmatic, and though athletic and otherwise healthy, when dust or fungi, bacteria or other pathogens enter into his body, his immune system fails to properly resist their effects.

When I’m a teenager, my dad and I turn the annual family ski trip into a father-daughter adventure. We fly to Park City for my spring break. The next year we drive to Mammoth. My mother makes the arrangements: books the condo, works the finances, tells us which shop has the cheapest rentals, and where to find the grocery store. We dutifully call her each evening but, I hate to admit, I don’t miss her. I like these days with my dad, peering into crevasses from the ski lift, following the lines his
skis make in the snow. In the evenings he cooks spaghetti with sausage or burgers with bacon. After, I study for my Advanced Placement exams while he watches baseball on the television.

My dad is kanaka maoli. Native Hawaiian. On the mountaintop, that sun so close you could lasso it, his skin turns impossibly dark. We get raccoon eyes from
our goggles. It is he and his Hawaiian friends—the ones I call uncles—who taught me to ski when I was four. Years later, as an adult, I think to ask, Why skiing? I learn
that he had never seen snow until he was in his mid-twenties. But his friends, all outrigger paddlers, needed a sport for the off-season, so they chose the most unlikely,
the biggest lark. They’ve always liked a good joke, and a bunch of Hawaiians on skis is it.

When I was a child, my mom was often asked if I was adopted. She of Norwegian-German extraction, skin so fair it burns in the first five minutes of summer. Hair a brilliant red. Her family says I have her eyes. We agree my nose is a mix
of parentage. The rest, my dad: my coloring, my mouth, my jawline. All his.

It’s not that I’m not close to my mom. I’m her in so many ways, become her more as I age. (No candy in my house, either. No bacon, to my fiancé’s chagrin.) But we are close in a way particular to mothers and daughters—as extensions of one another, we recognize in the other what we least like in ourselves.

With my father it’s different. I am his little girl. Always will be. At the movies he still covers my eyes during sex scenes. He did this recently. I’m 35. But I don’t mind being his little girl, his sweetheart. We see in each other the best part of ourselves, and so to please him is to please myself. His happiness is worth more than any other’s, because it is my happiness, too.

I used to, as a child and even adolescent, love to nap with my dad. He worked the
night shift for three-month swings, and in those weeks he would sleep during the day. He preferred a mat on the floor, rather than the marital four-post bed. The mat
was a holdover from his childhood in Hawai‘i and remained useful for finding a cool spot to rest in the midday Los Angeles heat. I’d come into the room and lie down next to him, match my breathing to his. He smelled like jet fuel—no surprise for an air-freight manager—and the husky-sour scent of his medicines, the prednisone and albuterol and other asthma medications that have been a mainstay of his, of our, life.

I described these naps recently to a friend, and I watched her expression as she struggled to overcome her concern and fear and confusion. I realized, watching her, how fortunate I have been. I associate my father and uncles with safety, warmth, the slow intake of breath. In Hawaiian, aloha means to share breath. My relationship with my father is one of aloha.

I realize this is not the case for many other women, especially those within indigenous communities. But I was gifted early with my dad, this great example of a good man, and thus my life has been filled with many good men.

During and since the election I have been thinking a lot about what it means to have a good person in a child’s life. Not a perfect person—my dad’s not perfect—but a good person. And I think having a good person in one’s life means building a foundation of self-worth, means increasing resistance to outside influences that will claim you have less value. Good people support who you are, all of you. And that support gives you strength, resilience. A good father or uncle, mom or aunt; an exceptional sibling, adopted family member or friend: They are like antibodies. It’s not that viruses or pathogens—those cruel words someone says about where you come from; the way, as a woman or person of color, you can be dismissed in a meeting; the bizarre attempts certain people make to assure you that their seeing you as less than them is a way of protecting you—cannot enter. They do enter—your body, your world, your heart. But having the right people, men and women, means you have the antibodies to resist that hurt, the strength to understand that those viral happenings are not true.

Here’s what I find so amazing about antibodies: Though they are formed in response to a single pathogen, a single sickness, they stay in your blood. They stick with you, for a lifetime, protecting you, maintaining your resistance, giving you strength, again and again and again.

When I lie next to my father, when I match my breath to his, I feel what it means to be him. To inhabit his inhalation is to inhabit his world. This is an act of empathy, of understanding. Sometimes I imagine myself as his protector, just as he has been mine. I cannot fix his asthma. I cannot take it away. But I like to think—and I suspect he would agree—that all those years of ski adventures and frozen yogurt and movies I have only viewed in fragments were a kind of resistance to the effects of his illness.

I want, in the days and weeks and years to come, to think of myself as an antibody. To be your antibody. That sounds so intimate. It’s meant to be. An antibody offers more than support—it gives protection. To be an antibody is to believe in someone else’s worth. Every one else’s worth. It’s the love of life, every life, but especially those
lives that are unequally threatened by our—our, we make them—systems, institutions, and government. It’s the commitment to fighting pathogens and to resisting their effects.

Such an effort takes empathy, understanding. It takes listening. Solidarity. Hope. Action. It takes love. Aloha. That sharing of breath. Inhaling a life—a father’s life, a daughter’s, a neighbor’s, a stranger’s—and holding it inside our lungs, our hearts, our own selves.

Lehua M. Taitano

CAPACITY

I have trouble swallowing:

rice ruebens on rye shrimp tempura
chicken breast bucatini puttanesca lumpia
Dutch crunch rolls lamb burger, onions & swiss red rice
shaved pork combination bún mochi
kelaguin bindadu lemon butter asparagus vanilla bread pudding
coconut cake medium rare kibbee cornbread and
butterbeans bahn mi buttermilk pancakes calamari
bi bim bap chicken fried steak mustard greens
tostadas de carnitas BBQ pork and slaw catfish
curly fries bunúelos ton katsu
mushroom kebaps potu pilaf
beef pot pie bangers pot brownies
lätke brats brownie brownies
kartoffeln salat kielbasa mousaka
chuletas cabbage dim sum
lasagna tri tip cobb salad
vermicelli linguini clams casino
horchata.

Well—not horchata.

Or anything liquid, smooth, smoothy-esque,
slick or oily, slippery, slidey,
esophageal glide-y.

I have a condition.

In which all the foods I love inflame my guttural lining,
puff up my smooth muscle membranes, make
the otherwise unfeel-able an
unavoidably painful stricture—
a bulging bolus punch
to the thorax,
a digestive impasse only water and gravity
can attempt to make lax.

Swallow upon swallow, I make
a river of my gullet, hope the rapids
will burst the dam of home cooking.

bottle-necked above my stomach.

And it has gotten so pronounced—
my occluded condition—
that I sought out a specialist
to investigate my painful indigestion.

Which brings me to the medical office
counter and the ensuing intake questions:

Can you verify your name?
Can you verify your date of birth?
Do you have a religious preference?
Tell me, what is your ethnicity?

And this. This is the location.
Where the throat spasms a twitch
in preparation for a stalling. A piling
up of what I’ve been swallowing.

My name is Lehuanani Marie Taitano.
I would prefer no religions at all.
I am Chamoru.

C-H-A-M-O-R-U
C-H-A-M
C-H-

But the assistant shakes
her head, scrolls through a drop-down
list of pre-existing ethnic
conditions.

She shakes her head,
brow furrowed, pointer finger
clicking, tapping, wagging no.

That’s not an option.

I am told that my ethnicity is not
an option.

Being Chamoru is not an option.

But before I get to the sucker punch, the
great, curled fist of Other,
let me tell you a story.

I could issue a litany of other scenarios,
regurgitate a pile of questions I’ve swallowed ,
little fishbone fragments of others’ doubt.

But I will tell you a story of belonging. Of when and
where and to whom and what. Of identification.
Of unavoidable collision. Of transplantation. Of the sea.

My first memory, the sea. Swallowing a mouthful
of saltwater in Tumon Bay. My siblings catching sea
cucumbers in the surf. My first memory of belonging.

Evening light, grip of sand, the quiet tug of tide
and the moon rising.

My siblings splashing, rejoicing in their brown bodies,
brown, like mine,
which is to say
half-some-hey-grel-why-your-dagun-so-white-brown.
Island-mama/
airforce-father
brown.

Coconut husks scooped
up and flown off to the “mainland” brown. And once there, too-too brown.

Word bank brown,
a puzzle for every introduction, like
where-you-from-
are-you-
ain’t-you
or ain’t you
where-
where-where-
my-great-white-eyes-
don’t-recognize
can’t-categorize
please-explain-yourself
to me, brown.

School, church, downtown, uptown, all around the same,
and home was no refuge because my father was
ashamed and drunk tried to kill my mother
in front of me and shot our puppies when they whined to be
let in and finally cast me off when he said my life
was nothing but sin because somehow God hates
fags and the only good brains I have come from the
white side of our family, which is to say, unslyly, him.

And what I have,
besides these big ass ears
and the way I sometimes place my hand
on my thigh
when I’m relaxed or listening
is this painting.

This painting,
a seastory sailing across
a canvas, masts puffed against clouds gathering
a pink-orange evening.

All the rigging taut, white foam kissing an
oaken keel. No land in sight, an unmanned ship, just
sailing.

I remember when the canvas
had a frame.

I remember the day he crashed
and raged and tore it from their bedroom wall,
fists and a jug of wine together
reeling and him, disgusted perhaps
with gazing at a reminder of wanting, once,
to be something like an empty vessel
cutting a path across an evening sea.

This painting, forgotten in a mice attic
until last year, when my sister sent it to me

What do you do with memories
you don’t want to keep?

Where can you store them that they won’t come
creeping back on a scent or melody?

At the medical office counter,
I tell the assistant I AM an option,
I am my only option,

I am the daughter of my mother, sister to four sisters and
a brother,
an auntie, great auntie, great-great auntie to
nieces, nephews—“kindling” I call them—
because fuck assumption of gender.

I tell her the flaw is not me,
and yes, it’s the whole goddamned system,
and no, I won’t be quiet until they sedate me,
which they do.

Inside:
the endoscopy.
My doctor guides a camera into the guts of me,
finds I’m suffering the same digestive side-effects
of monoculture
as I had suspected.

Home from the hospital, in the house filled with
boxes from my most recent migration,
the painting.

Unframed. Leaning against a shelf.
Reminding me.

That at least once, my father
had the capacity to create. To sit and
imagine a scene filled with wind and cloud
and light. That some version of himself
was compelled
to make art
and love and children,
before he filled himself up, instead,
to the brim, with toxicity.

I will not replace the frame,
but hang the canvas raw and ragged,
let art and poetry frame it how I choose.

It will remind me that poetry is my home,
a place of belonging
that can house memories, choices,
the best versions of
ourselves.

Donovan Kūhiō Colleps

OUR RED ROAD

This morning I didn’t even honi you when I came in.
I just walked right by your shallow breath,
your eyes shut in the living room, and that bed
stuffed with pulu. And all the blurred words
projecting onto the backs of your eyelids.

Ke alanui maʻawe ‘ula a Kanaloa…

I organize your prescription bottles like kiʻi
along the edges of the kitchen heiau
and try to remember how long it’s been
since you strung a sentence together
and draped it over my shoulders.

I grew up mountain view and I can always see
mauna kea and mauna loa same time

In the afternoon I thicken your drinking water,
obsessing on what you’ll want for the road, and pack
some paʻi ʻai a me ka iʻa. Bundled guesswork
disguised as intention once the oceans open up.
I keep a version of you in my pocket that asks,

Maybe this red road is not mine, but ours, Boy?
So make some food for you, too.

In the evening I sit you up and our eyes trace the octopus’s
footprints moonlit in the yard grass. You smile
and gulp the thick water, and I keep obsessing
about which muʻumuʻu you’ll want to wear in the waʻa.

Carl Pao

John Dominis Holt

HAPA

Dark waltzes

Twirl and swirl

Inside my head tonite.

Three-four time reminders

of a pastel time

when gilded walls

and brilliant lights provided

backdrop to the dazzling

raiment of daring duos

lost in the banality

of place and sound

capturing me in my

softer parts so that

remembrance has no mercy—

I think of hula kahiko

and its vigourous beat

its mass gestures, its outdoor

splendor of fern and ‘ohi’a

leaf

its abstract emotions

in the dappled shade

arms and bodies

swirling to the dictates

of another time—

I am not saddened, nor gladdened.

Dark waltzes like dark

lilacs, dark roses, or

frantic calls of violins—

excite and sadden both.

I could not stop to twirl

and swirl

left in the far universe

of lost hungers.

I reach out of the forest

fragrance of maile

the clean, clear perfume of ginger

the strong red flames

at the end of ‘ohia’a branches

but I also hanker for rococo

ballrooms

ornate furniture and polished

floors.

Here I am between

the pala palai fragrance

of Laka’s world

where drum beats

and the ‘ohe flute notes

command the air

whilst part of my heart

clings to polished floors

and gilded chandeliers

where dark waltzes

are the music for the dance—

where dark lilacs, violets and roses

perfume the air.

Kristiana Kahakauwila

TURTLES

At the overpass we turned, the towpath
packed with loaves of stone and spring’s
first showgirl turtles sunning.

If we belonged to Frost or Academics,
in fact, if we believed the corner-
stone crumbled beneath strident

arguing for the upkeep of pencil-hatched
paths melting, and the deer population bled
red to river white, then wouldn’t the toll

road be faster and less likely to see
bowler hat key chains, herbs, flannel pajamas,
and writerly accoutrements for radio?

You can hate B. Collins, cocaine, or New
Hampshire, but I’ll take the street cobbled
with tan lines and fragment lyrics

if the wood turtles keep feeding.

Imaikalani Kalahele

Haunani-Kay Trask

IN OUR TIME

In memory of Noa Tong Aluli
Hawaiian of the land, 1919-1980

today, I went to the grave
no flowers, no tears, no words

the wind came up slightly
from the ocean
salt and warmth

you were the earth
as you are now

I cannot imagine
your life, being
younger by a generation:
all those children, all
that work, so much silence

in the end, your going
was familiar: a family
trial, burning nightly

certain to the bitter end
your sons, your wife
your daughter
myself

and now, there is
only earth, the salt
wind, a small
story of many years

I came to understand
but only the sea remains
constant and dark

O Noa, we don’t
live like you anymore
there is nothing
certain in this world

except loss
for our people

and a silent grief,
grieving

John Dominis Holt

SACRIFICE

What a price you paid

My Polynesian sisters

For those long, fat white

Cocks from Cook’s time down.

At first you did it for pleasure

it felt so good—so different

from the stubby brown ones

of your own men

that you did it more often—

all night if necessary

for a quarter a trick.

What did it do to you, to us

this willing sacrifice

of your flesh?

Many of you died from

The rotted inseminations

poisonous with disease.

Many of the children

you bore were ‘ihepa

Or deformed.

In your wild ecstasy

you corrupted your

                  ‘ohana—

your joys brought shame and rage.

We stood by letting you do it.

We encouraged it:  your

Husbands, boyfriends, brothers

                  and fathers.

We even waited in waterfront bars

for you to bring the money.

We killed you.

In turn you debauch

our race with genes

from the sewerage collected in bodies

who came from afar.

Imaikalani Kalahele

John Dominis Holt

REMEMBERING KAKA’AKO

Kaka’ako used to

be a different place.

One of boot leggers,

pipi stew—

sweet-meated ‘alamihi eaten raw

and sweet late night strummings

of Mary Lukini

Ukrainian born artiste

of the slack key style—

‘Iolani lived at Kaka’ako

for a time

and years before that

my great grandparents

and before them

Keopuolani and her

infant daughter Nahienaena.

There is an archetype lump

inside me causing me

to love Kaka’ako.

It was home for my

Polynesian ancestors on O’ahu

down the centuries

of time.

Mamala was a place to come

for respite from priestly

rigors and heart smashing

rituals on the Big Island

place of Umi a Liloa

and later Keawe.

A rest from Molokai’s Kalaipahao dangers

a change from Kauai’s banal

lyricism.

Kaka’ako where you

drank ‘okolehao

for a week-end

and made wild love in

drunken slumbers.

Michael McPherson

AUNTIE KINA ON THE KING STREET TRAM

Auntie Kina come from Molokai,
small kid time her family stay.
She come Honolulu for marry
the Irishman, come city lady.
When she go downtown, some dress
up she make. She put on her black
dress, her black hat: some kind
dignity this Hawaiian, you no can
believe. She come outside Alexander-
Young, the pastry shop, she go for
climb on top the trolley for go home.
The conductor, Mr. Kaahawai, he tell,
“Madam, kindly step to the rear of the car.”
Whoo, auntie wild up with him. Some
kind stink eye she give, the kind no get
these days. Little more melt
the streetcar. But Mr. Kaahawai,
he old family, some kind stink eye
he give her back, the rails smoking.
She raise herself up, then she go
sit in back the empty tram. Bumbye
when come to her stop, Mr. Kaahawai tell,
“Madam, may I assist you to descend?”
Now auntie more piss off, but one more time
she summon up all her dignity, and she tell,
“No thank you, sir, I shall descend unattended.”

Alva Andrews

Imaikalani Kalahele

Where does the sun set?

Is it here?

Is it there?

I know it was somewhere!

Perhaps a storm came

and the stream

washed it away.

Perhaps the mountains

came down on us

and covered it all up.

Maybe it was the kai.

Maybe the kai came up

and flooded the valleys,

and on its way back

when hapai everything

and take it out to sea.

        Nah brah,

        it wasn’t any of these things.

        The storm was greed,

        swelling like a damned up stream

        making ready to over-run

        and wash away.

        And the mountains that crumbled

        did so because of absence.

              Absence from the land.

              Absence from the kai.

              Absence from the people.

              Absence from the mana.

            And we know what the wave was:

                     Genocide.

            Flooding the valleys

            and striping the limu clean

            from the rocks.

            Sweeping away the opae

            from the streams,

            the ‘ulu from the land,

            and the maoli from the earth.

     So…ah…tell me brah,

     Where does the sun set?

           Is it here?

           Is it there?

     Tell me,

           where do I take

                      Granpa’s bones now?

Leialoha Apo Perkins

THE DAY THE ALOHA MAFIA
MOVED INTO THENEIGHBOURHOOD

When I was a child, I had an overwhelming wish every candle-blowing birthday to see pōkane. Pōkane are marchers of the night. They are short, strong, and dead. They
do no harm that anyone can recall, but are never trusted to remain in that reputed disposition: it is always possible they just may…The most terrible thing about them
is that they exist in the same world that we do.

When I turned forty years old, I decided to change my birthday wish. I was never going to see pōkane, although I believed in pōkane just as much as ever, exactly
as my grandchildren did. But I had no more desire to waste my time waiting to meet pōkane that obviously didn’t want to meet me. At just about this time, anyway, I became interested in the living who seemed dead, and who sometimes behaved in that way and sometimes in another. It’s hard to explain. You’d understand if you were Hawaiian and pōkane were what you knew were the dead who marched like the living, and who made the living behave in ways that they ordinarily don’t and may not even consciously never ever want to (not even for fun).

I wanted on my fortieth birthday to meet all the Hawaiians that my life could be filled up with knowing. I had been for three years immersed baptismally in Hawaiian
Studies–learning hula, canoe racing, lau hala weaving, feather lei making, ‘ukulele playing, singing, and speaking Hawaiian. I wasn’t to good at most of the exercises, but I made an effort. Ho’omau (try), my teachers said, but of course they got paid every time I enrolled and showed up for the same lessons in their Adult Education classes. Anyway, I was keen about Hawaiian Studies, and about meeting Hawaiians, including the Hawaiian mafia.

From what the newspapers said of the Hawaiian mafia, they were what my Tahitian-French cousin calls les enfants terribles (the bad boys). Vaitahi, my cousin, says it in such a way I know exactly what she means even if I never heard a word of French in my life before. Vaitahi tells me that the English language is no good for some nuances: English loses all force to capture the terror of the mafia’s simple existence with us on the same earth.

I am an ordinary Hawaiian housewife who reads the newspaper almost every day and retreats into the past with every onslaught of modern Western innovative living (that’s my cousin talking—she’s a journalist and relates to things in real ways, so I asked her to help me write this). I retreat, she says, because I still believe firmly
in the good, old values of traditional Hawai’i nei. She believes in Tahitian values, too, she says, but she picks and chooses, since she’s been to Paris. Being a Tahitian in Paris is like being a haole in Hawai’i, except that there’s a kind of positive side to the negative feeling and a negative side to the positive feeling: men like you for the wrong reasons, and as for women–you can never tell.

But my interest in meeting all kinds of Hawaiians, even the Hawaiian mafia, stemmed from a dream: that the Hawaiian warrior class was not dead. Its members lived,
but as outlaws, bandits in their own land. Its members are easy to spot if you understood the ways of traditional Hawai’i–because its members are the most independent of the law; they are the law; there is no other law but the law that its members make (ad hoc, as my Neighbourhood Board Chairman likes to call all his committees). And we, the maka’ainana (commoners), gave the warriors their old power, because we believed in the gods who were not too different in a way from the pōkane.

The power we followed was the power of the spirits of our ancestors. And who were our ancestors? Some of the people in power. But to hold on to this power,
our ancestors and their representatives at any given time were nothing unless they had physical force, or the power to say so and make you believe it. That means
human manpower and numbers of the same. You could tell where mana lay–where some kind of physical force lay behind the mental force.

What made warriors spiritual in their power was the same thing that made pōkane spiritual. Pōkane didn’t harm–that anybody could put their finger on for sure–but
they could, if they wanted to, whereas the warriors had to, to prove they could. Most of the time nobody could catch the pokane wanting to do harm. That was why the
warrior class was important. It took the orders doing the harm in the name of the spirits.

These kind of ideas straight out of Adult Education Anthropology intrigued me. I could hardly wait to meet the next Hawaiian. My horoscope printed in the Honolulu
Advertiser said that soon one day I would meet someone exciting who would change my whole lifestyle.

One day the neighbourhood rumour had it that the Hawaiian mafia had moved in. A short time later, after carpenters and painters had just finished fixing up the vacant house next door, a huge moving van drove up and stopped at its front walk. Three men–big, burly, and young Hawaiians, all dressed in clean, well-pressed aloha shirts–got out. They began promptly to unload crated boxes from the van. I went out to water the lawn. I saw this as an excellent opportunity to try out what I was learning at night school.

“Aloha no!” (Greetings!) I called out, in my best, newly acquired Hawaiian intonations copied week after week from my Hawaiian teachers in class. “Aloha no!” I repeated, waving a stream of water in the air for good measure.

The first young man carrying a load gazed at me in surprise, saw the jet of water looping in the air, and continued walking in silent disgust. He didn’t say
a word. He just passed into the house. Another young man came up the day-lily hedged walk. “Pehea ‘oe?” “How are you?” I instantly translated myself to
be better understood. It didn’t help, for he, too, simply grunted and passed into the house. A third mover approached. “Aue!” “Oh, my!” I said. “Kaumaha no!” “Heavy
indeed!” I then complimented solely in English with emphasis, “But you are so strong!” I was pleased to hear how good my Hawaiian was sounding, spoken to other real Hawaiians, out side the classroom.

I suddenly noticed though, the appearance of the crates all the men had been carrying into the house. They reminded me of the size and shape of munition crates
that I had seen on TV or at the movies. In realizing this, I inadvertently jerked my arm, and a spray of water shot forward into the other yard, aimed, one might have thought, perfectly at the strong, young, silent mover. I was aghast. I dropped the hose on my bare feet. A chill ran up my spine.

“E i nei.” called the third mover, putting his machine-gun-looking crate down gently. “Da best kind neighbour is da kind dat no try be frien’ fo’ not’ing.” He then lifted the crate, seemingly effortlessly, and stalked into the house. By this time the first young man was passing out of the house. “I’m Maile Waiwai,” I said to him. This was the young man who had looked with disgust at my greeting him in our Hawaiian language. “Waewae who?” he replied. He said it in a way, as if who was the last thing he wanted to be concerned with. He smiled (in good-humoured contempt, Vaitahi bets), but he nodded his head at the same time, getting his body language signals crossed and crossing out all of them together.

“What’s your name?” I asked, now feeling sheepish but not wanting to retreat. His lips curled. He could have been born with such a sneer: it ran from one ear to the other.

The second young man came out. I said nothing this time. I retrieved the hose and began to re-water the marigolds. I felt eyes looking at me, though, sort of like at
the back of my head, so I looked up in the young man’s direction. He pointed at the hose and with a single deft movement of his right hand, he wound an imaginary hose
around his neck and jerked it once. It made my skin crawl. Marcel Marceau could not have been better.

The third young man came out. He was smiling now. He was a very good-looking young man. Of the three, he looked as though he could be my own son. As he passed down the walk, he made a movement with his hands at his crotch. Then he smiled a small, quiet, razor-sharp smile.

“Come inside!” my husband called out in a stern voice. He might have been calling to the young man instead of to me. I was confused. I carried the hose to the other
side of the yard, silently, as though it were an electric eel, and I lay it down where the day lilies grew wildly in the flower trough.

Just then a car came careening around the corner and a shot rang out.

“Come inside, you damned fool!” my husband called out. I ran in and slammed the door. I went into the kitchen and began to peel potatoes, thinking how silly I was to
be speaking Hawaiian to those men. It was only then that I noticed that I was gritting my teeth all the while.
There was a return shot almost like a warning, it seemed, although for whom and what I did not know. “The best neighbours are neighbours who don’t give a damn!” I
said out loud to myself. It went against all the years of my Sunday school learning to say that in a way that made it sound like sense. To each his own ‘ohana style, I thought. And then I also thought: never make a birthday wish. It might just come true—warriors and all.

The next day, while I was watering the marigolds again, the first guy came out of the house. “Hey, Waewae!” he called out. I could scarcely trust my ears. “I’m Emp.”
“Emp?” I repeated, dumbly— “Emp?”
“Yeah, Emperor,” he said. “An’ dat guy ova dea is Noble. An’ da uddah one is Killer Pa’i.”
At first I didn’t know how to answer, but then I heard myself saying again, “I’m Maile Waiwai.”
“Yeah, Waewae—dass a funny name, you know, FEET.”
“No, it means rich,” I interjected. “Waiwai, not Waewae!”
“Rich?” he asked, incredulity saturating his manner. He looked down the front of my dress and then at my bare feet. It’s true. I have big, brown, lu’au feet. “Dass iss funny alright,” he said, chuckling. “An’ Hawaiian as hell, huh? So dat you no go be poor—you say da opposite t’ing.”
“How come your name is Emperor?” I asked, not too pleased with his sense of humour. Besides, he had the Hawaiian idea wrong; you never mention what you mean.

“Becauz, dass wat i iss, lady, dass how,” Emp shot back. He could have been a warrior, I thought, except that he was approachable. Other than our initial meeting,
he didn’t seem to make me, a woman, kiss the ground before he let me talk to him. He was more democratic like, something that he may have picked up when he drank his maka’ainana mother’s breast milk.
His two friends walked to where he was standing. Then the guy named Killer Pa’i—the one who could have been my own son—looked at me out of the corner of his eyes.
He looked as though he was taking my clothes off in his mind, side-eyes wise.
“Any time,” Emp went on, “we can do you one favour, neighbour-like, jes’ give us da sign, like diss.” He held up his right hand. His index finger curled tightly around
his middle finger, the upper joint of which was missing, just as the newspapers said the Japanese yakuza from Japan had finger joints missing.
“That sign?” I said, “that’s a good luck sign?” My knees turned rubbery.
“Oh, shuah,” Emp answered, promptly, with a light laugh. “Shuah it iss.”
“Jes’ give us da sign if you need, huh? he said again, looking around at his buddies. “We gotta go fishing now,” he concluded.
“Alo-o-o-ha, he added, not waving his hand or nodding his head pleasantly as Hawaiians do, but hoisting his pants by the belt, as he walked down the lily hedge path, followed by Noble and Killer Pa’i. They moved toward a big, black, shiny Continental limousine, where another young man, only a kid about seventeen years old, still in the pimply stage of life, was waiting for them at the driver’s wheel. The limousine didn’t have a single fishing rod sticking out of its windows.
I went inside the house. “Fishing, my foot,” I said, growing madder by the minute. “You mean hunting. and as for your lucky sign and that Alo-o-o-ha jazz…”
“You talking to yourself now?” my husband asked, marching into the kitchen like a soldier who had stood guard all night. I gave him a nasty look. I wasn’t the strange
one walking around this neighbourhood, that was for sure. But my husband just kept looking at me as he posted himself at the refrigerator. He looked as though what he had to say was not for saying but for staring.
“Our neighbours,” I said finally, because the staring went on, “may raise the real estate value of our house, you know, but I have to wish on my next birthday to hope
that we live so long.”

Christy Passion

KINGS

While the women were in the kitchen split between
salting the pork belly and cutting the taro stems,
and the nearest kid shuttled another Primo to Uncle Frank
before being released to play, the planning gave way
to the answer—Kalihi Super Meats.
Jimmy was the first to lean in, elbows on the fold-out table.
Yes, yes, his car was out of the shop, 7:30 Sunday morning
keep the engine running, yeah, he could do that.
Norman boy was on board but kept it cool
slouched in his chair, left arm wrapped into his undershirt,
sly smile and his mother’s dimples. Bobby just laughed
but his hands were steady and his knees stopped bouncing.
It took awhile to get there: three hours of shooting the shit,
two cases of beer split between four men and challenges to
each other’s manhood. By the time the late afternoon heat
blurred to a cool Kapahulu evening it was agreed
that Bobby’s wife, Rosina, would distract the salesclerk
while Norman Boy and Uncle Frank worked the manager.
Two grand easy maybe even three. There was no urgency
or disguise in their talk, just a repetition of ideas polished till
all were assured and shiny. The evening star was luminous
in its indigo slice of sky. The rest of the brazen stars followed
unwavering like the gaze of badass angels—
they raised their bottles up to those ancients: to their Uncles,
Fathers and Grandfathers before them and were blessed.
Exultant as the answer braved edges, their own borders shifted—
Each man now a king; growing stronger, more cunning
the odds started tipping in their favor, the rules were bending
and if anyone bothered to look at the plumeria trees
lining the yard, they would have seen them tremble.

Imaikalani Kalahele and the Mokaki Band

DAZED AND CONFUSED

Imaikalani Kalahele – improv poetry / Peter Kealoha – guitar / Chuck Souza – guitar Greg Kekipi – ‘ukulele / Peter Chamberlain – keyboards

Imaikalani Kalahele

Dana Naone Hall

KA MO’OLELO O KE ALANUI

The Story of the Road

More than four hundred years ago,
as it comes down to us,
the road was built by Kihaapi’ilani,
who spread his cape over Maui.
When the ‘ohia’a blossoms were
tossed by the wind
he travelled to the island of Hawai’i
to ask for ‘Umi’s help,
and returned with a fleet of canoes
and warriors to conquer Hana.
From Hana the rest of the island
fell to him like a ripe fruit.
In the years that followed,
the farmers and fishermen,
native tenants of the land,
placed on the brow of the coast,
as it circled the island,
a road to catch the falling sound
of the runner’s feet.
Kukini carried messages past
petals of cliffs opening in mist.
Near the shore, the akule,
silver black and still quivering,
was divided among
the paddlers and those who helped
bring in the nets.
The white tapa hung from the pole
announced the arrival of Lono Makua
during the Makahiki.
Feathers and the food of the land
were brough to the ahu
along the road where the god
in his pig form was waiting.

Closer to our time, cattle
crossed the road and were herded
to the anchored boat.
Poi, wrapped in ti leaves,
came by way of another boat from Kihei.
Horses, oxen and wagons stirred up
the dust on the road,
pausing at the one store, where hands
exchanged things over counters,
then continued on into this century.

Now there is car surf on the road
and the waves keep breaking
Dust mixing with salt air.
After all these years,
we are being told that the road
will be closed. Those who propose it
don’t know that the road is alive.
Give up the road they tell us
and it will be replaced
with a sign that says
we can get to the beach this way,
only don’t get off the path or cut across the grass,
and hang on to your children
not to mention don’t let go of your
cooler until you hit the sand.
For all your troubles
there’ll be a comfort station
in the parking lot (a comfort to whom?)
and even a concrete trail
to mark where the old road once passed
between the hotel and the beach,
open so many hours a day
and closed when the sun goes down.

The lizard woman is talking
but who is listening?
At night,
when the island is deep
in the crater of sleep,
across the channel
the mo’o
raises its head
one eye reflecting the moon.

Tamara Wong-Morrison

GROUNDBREAKING AND BLESSING, Phase I

Traditional Hawaiian blessing they say
for the stone walls they bulldozed
for their shopping village.

American steak and Mexican food,
a t-shirt shop
even.

Another plantation
another quality development.

Dust from their shovels are prayers mumbled away by the wind.
Money, money matters.

Green, growing . . .
they plant many trees (monkeypod!) and
fertilize them for fast growth.

Still I prefer the dry koa and stones . . .

Carl Pao

Haunani-Kay Trask

RETURNING TO WAIMANALO

between two worlds
shorelines of meaning form
edging closer, farther
marking the one space
where all my selves
cease transforming

war continues on one side
from the other beckons
a different front:
all battle, scarred
and scarring
two worlds, two
world wars

but here, there is a moment
a fall light along
the shore, gleaming
a changing shoreline
this is not peace, or
solitude. i am too
unseasoned for that

it is something strange:
intelligible space
in a bitter universe
rhythm amidst terrifying noise
human need that does not
suffer

it is my experience
when struggle wanes

myself, and my people
absorbing sounds
near a silent sea
forming ancient
contours of meaning

Christy Passion

SAND ISLAND REVISITED

I drive past the rusted tower
sewage-salt water taints the air
rubbish weeds litter the view
Was it here?
My uncle’s fishing village, my weekend home? No,
not here. Nor this tent city, this drug haven, this
attemptable manicured park. I drive past

so where parking lot meets grassy field.
Bowed, I step here for the first time in twenty-five years:
Sand Island. I am not here
to fish or pick limu—
those days are gone. I come
to make ipu heke with my brothers and sisters, together
we go over the grassy slope to the sand divide: I see

waves still curve diamonds and sun still burns
my hapahaole skin. Sand still is large and coarse,
not fine like imports at Waikiki
we need rough to smooth our ipu
we need rough to shape our way

Our laughter carries over to Mokauea. Resurrected,
the shore break chants—we remain we remain we remain

Chuck Souza

ROLLIN’

Chuck Souza – guitar, vocals / Sam Henderson – guitar / Beau Leonidus – bass guitar / Greg Kekipi -‘ukulele / Kevin Daley – drums / Creed Fernandez – congas, percussion / Louie “The Fish” Denolfo – harmonica / Kurt Thompson – keyboards

Carl Pao

Brandy Nālani McDougall

THE PETROGLYPHS AT OLOWALU

The highway to Lahaina, newly paved
and lined in paint, curves against the mountain,

its ridges, cutting black against the gray.
Draped in dry grass, windward slopes descend

from a cloudless sky toward Olowalu,
whose pali is sharp, abrupt. Here, the waves

carve tunnels, caves. They’ve outlived the hands who
pressed the lines of ghosts into the cliff-face:

stiff triangular figures, broad-shouldered
men and women, the ancestors who climb

or fall against the pali wall, buffered
by ocean wind, the salt spun fine by time.

Tracing the lines those before me began—
their words I ask for, the old work of hands.

Leialoha Apo Perkins

ON HEARING HOW A POET LIVED AT KULA-WAIAKOA

He took his brand-new wife to the mountains
and set up house-keeping with kerosene lamps
and timber, partly cut by hand, and stones
for a fire to make stew of old meat bought
at the gas station store on the fog-bound road
near ‘Ulupalakua. And they wrote in the stolen
light of morning, the wind whipping them in,
and they worked the garden—clearing panini
in pasture, crab grass, and nasturtium heads
between stones. They planted seeds like old,
familiar bones.

I could have cried to hear it said, in the same place
that my wanderers’ heart stops, knowing home
is a fixity of place, north, to end all waywardnesses
of mind breaking faith. I could have cried,
but did not.

They—the poet and his shining wife—may turn the spade
where the land had crooked my father’s back
and made my mother’s hands grow stiff and her knees,
arthritic, and my heart cold as stone that a plot
could keep father, mother with no mercy for having loved
it well—for the foolish, senseless reasons it was
theirs to start,
and they were young
and wrote poems
in the mountain’s mornings,
(the wind whipping them shut in),
And worked a stone garden
Until the fog shroud light gave out.

Wayne Kaumaualii Westlake

NO ONE UNDERSTANDS THE SEA—UPON RECEIPT OF MY
33RD REJECTION NOTICE

no one understands my poetry—

to understand my poetry
you got to understand my philosophy

no one understands my philosophy—

to understand my philosophy
you got to understand me

no one understands me—

to understand me
you got to understand Hawaii

no one understands Hawaii—

to understand Hawaii
you got to understand the Sea

no one understands the Sea

NO ONE UNDERSTANDS MY PHILOSOPHY!
NO ONE UNDERSTANDS THE SEA!
NO ONE UNDERSTANDS HAWAII!
NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ME!

rejection notices? here’s thirty three!
NO ONE UNDERSTANDS MY POETRY!
NO ONE UNDERSTANDS THE SEA!

. . . an old black crab
crawls down the long beach
with nothing in its claws . . .

. . . a wasted bee
without a Sting
drowns himself in the Sea . . .

Haunani-Kay Trask

AN AGONY OF PLACE

there is always this sense:
a wash of earth
rain, palm light falling
across ironwood
sands, fine and blowing
in an ancient sea

I hear them always:
with fish hooks and nets
dark, long
red canoes
gliding thoughtlessly
to sea

and the still lush hills
of laughter
buried in secret
caves, bones of love
and ritual, and sacred
life

a place for the mano
the pueo, the ‘o’o
for the smooth flat pohaku
for a calabash of stars
flung over the Pacific

and yet
our love suffers
with a heritage
of beauty

in a land of tears

where our people
go blindly
servants of another
race, a culture of machines

grinding vision
from the eye, thought
from the hand
until a tight silence
descends

wildly in place

Craig Santos Perez

gigen THE MICRONESIAN KINGFISHER [I sihek]

[our] nightmare : no
birdsong—
the jungle was riven emptied
of [i sihek] bright blue green turquoise red gold
feathers—everywhere : brown
tree snakes avian
silence—

the snakes entered
without words when [we] saw them it was too late—
they were at [our] doors sliding along
the passages of [i sihek]
empire—then

the zookeepers came—
called it species survival plan—captured [i sihek] and transferred
the last
twenty-nine micronesian kingfishers
to zoos for captive breeding [1988]—they repeated [i sihek]
and repeated :

“if it weren’t for us
your birds [i sihek]
would be gone
forever”

what does not change /

last wild seen—

Carl Pao

Imaikalani Kalahele and the Mokaki Band

REVENGE

Imaikalani Kalahele – improv poetry and beer bottle used as a makeshift flute
Peter Kealoha – guitar / Chuck Souza – guitar / Joe Balaz – bass guitar
Peter Chamberlain – keyboards

Lehua M. Taitano

SIGE, SIGE, SIGE SAID THE UTAK

Carl Pao

Chuck Souza

HIGHER COURT

Chuck Souza – guitar, vocals / Mihana Souza – vocals / Star Williams – vocals / Sam Henderson – guitar / Beau Leonidus – bass guitar / Greg Kekipi -‘ukulele / Kevin Daley – drums / Creed Fernandez – congas, percussion / Kurt Thompson – keyboards

Craig Santos Perez

PRAISE SONG FOR OCEANIA

for World Oceans Day

“…as if there is a path where beings truly meet,
as if I am rounding the human corners.”

—Linda Hogan, “The Turtle Watchers”

praise your capacity for birth
fluid currents and trenchant darkness
praise our briny beginning
source of every breath

praise your capacity for renewal
ascent into clouds and descent into rain
praise your underground aquifers
rivers and lakes, ice sheets and
glaciers
praise your watersheds and hydrologic cycles

praise your capacity to endure
the violation of those who map you aqua nullius
who claim dominion over you
who pillage and divide your body
into latitudes and longitudes
who scar your middle passages

praise your capacity to survive
our trawling boats breaching
your open wounds and taking
from your collapsing
depths

praise your capacity to dilute
our heavy metals and greenhouse gases
sewage and radioactive waste
pollutants and plastics

praise your capacity to bury
our shipwrecks and ruined cities
praise your watery grave
human reef of bones

praise your capacity to remember
your library of drowned stories
museum of lost treasures
your vast archive of desire

praise your tidalectics
your migrant routes
and submarine roots

praise your capacity to smother
whales and fish and wash them ashore
to save them from our cruelty
to show us what we’re no longer allowed to take
to starve us like your corals starved and bleached
liquid lungs choked of oxygen

praise your capacity to forgive
please forgive our territorial hands and acidic breath
please forgive our nuclear arms and naval bodies
please forgive our concrete dams and cabling
veins
please forgive our deafening sonar and lustful tourisms
please forgive our invasive drilling and deep sea mining
please forgive our extractions and
trespasses

praise your capacity for mercy
please let my grandpa catch just one more fish
please make it stop raining soon
please make it rain soon
please spare our fragile farms and fruit trees
please spare our low-lying island ad atolls
please spare our coastal villages and cities
please let us cross safely to a land without
war

praise your capacity for healing
praise your cleansing rituals
praise your holy baptisms
please protect our daughter
when she swims in your currents

praise your halcyon nests
praise your pacific stillness
praise your breathless calm

praise your capacity for hope
praise your rainbow warrior and peace boat
praise your hokule’a and sea shepherd
praise your arctic sunrise and freedom flotillas
praise your nuclear free and independent pacific movement
praise your marine stewardship councils and sustainable fisheries
praise your radical seafarers and native
navigators
praise your sacred water walkers
praise your activist kayaks and traditional canoes
praise your ocean conservancies and surfrider
foundations
praise your aquanauts and hydrolabs
praise your Ocean Cleanup and Google Oceans
praise your whale hunting and shark finning bans
praise your sanctuaries and no take zones
praise your pharmacopeia of new antibiotics
praise your #oceanoptimism and Ocean Elders
praise your wave and tidal energy
praise your blue humanities

praise your capacity for echolocation
praise our names for you that translate
into creation stories and song maps
tasi : kai : tai : moana nui : vasa :
tahi : lik : wai tui : wonsolwara

praise your capacity for communion
praise our common heritage
praise our pathway and promise to each other
praise our most powerful metaphor
praise your vision of belonging
praise our endless saga
praise your blue planet
one world ocean
praise our trans-oceanic
past present future flowing
through our blood

Carl Pao

Chuck Souza

E LEI I NA MAMO

Chuck Souza – guitar, vocals / Sam Henderson – guitar / Beau Leonidus – bass guitar / Greg Kekipi -‘ukulele / Kevin Daley – drums / Mike Paulo – alto sax
Creed Fernandez – congas, percussion / Kurt Thompson – keyboards

Michael McPherson

The House of Images

i

Side by each stand
warrior and farmer,
mason and fisherman
from the rivermouth
at Paukukalo
half a mile
to the bluff
above the river,
and arm and arm
they pass
smooth riverstones
from the sea
to this hill
of sand,
all in the moon
of a single night,
it is said,
an army of spirits,
ghosts of sailors
far from long forgotten seas
in a line to the hill
where stands
their chief,
and touches the man
whose bones will stand
beneath the cornerstone
of this, his temple.

ii

Sand blows
in his eyes
from the dry
riverbed below,
his eyes now dim
to the burned
kiawe stumps,
to the stands
of haole koa,
the bleached
white shells
of snails
at his feet,
stand guard
against the coming
time of need
and across
the drying river
the rotten shells
of automobiles
standing in rows,
the Wailuku
rivers of blood
and sorrow
rank and rank
of battered fenders
worn down upon the path
of the new dream,
when under darkened skies
deep in the valley
the new Gods
of shining metals
unknown
to island men,
the river
scatters blood of priests
forged in fires
of another mind
that too
in its time
over these rivers
stand guard
against the day
decays, and its Gods
fallen,
the white fire
of its torches
extinguished,
these our Gods are ashes
in the valley wind
the tall stacks
of the mills
corrode
in silence,
the bells
in the steeples,
and our own bones
dust
mixed with sand
from this hill
their tongues
like sacks
swollen with coin, hang heavy
in the dry salt wind

Imaikalani Kalahele

Mahealani Wendt

E ALA E

The dream dreaming me
Sings me through
Coil and pear
Of heart’s concentric shell:
It carries me
Full-voiced for greeting
Sun’s first scatter
Of cloud
And gentian sky.

I sing praise
For planting,
For flowers stirring
With earth’s morning prayer;
I sing praise for
Ocean’s baptism—
The naked shiver of hi’uwai;
For sand, sacred;
Inscrutable stone, and
Taciturn sea.

The dream dreaming me
Sings me through
Meter and rhyme,
Syncopation of star and tide.
I am a whisper
Through shadow
Of tall silver trees;
A spirit feathered and white
Rising with moon.

Dana Naone Hall

FALL INTO GRACE

The ocean is a turmoil of waves,
waves trying to climb the backs of other waves
and breaking in clouds of foam in the effort.
Nature has taken everything out of our hands
and we do not know whether to swim or fly.

We are cast out of the mouth of a cave.
Stones pile up behind us.

Each contains enough food for a week.
With water they combine the universe.
Small stones underfoot sweet with life,
whole cliffs practicing heights,
suddenly remembered stones
and those given at birth—

When we die
we fall among them like rain.

Haunani-Kay Trask

I GO BY THE MOONS

I go by the trail
of earth and green
slivers of sun
pendulous rain.

I go by the dream trees
flame trees hissing
and swaying.

I go by the shores
and coconut dunes, soft crab
sand in my heart.

I go by the temples
maile vines fresh
with tears.

I go by the taro
velvet-leafed god
flesh and mud.

I go by the thrust
of Konahuanui
his lava jet
jeweled with fern.

I go by the moons
expectant
feeling in the throat
for the chanter.

Imaikalani Kalahele

Imaikalani Kalahele and the Mokaki Band

Peter Kealoha – song, lead vocal, guitar / Imaikalani Kalahele – additional vocal, chant, improv poem / Chuck Souza – guitar / Peter Chamberlain – keyboards

SOVRINTI Part A

Part B

Mahealani Wendt

VOYAGE

We are brothers
In a vast blue heaven,
Windswept kindred
Souls at sea.
We are the sons
Of immense night,
Planets, brilliant and obscure,
Illimitable stars,
Somnolent moon.
We have loved
Lash and sail,
Shrill winds and calm,
Heavy rains driven in squalls
Over turbulent sea.
We have lashed our hearts
To souls of islands,
Joined spirits with birds
Rising to splendor
In a gold acquiescence of sun.
We are voyagers—
Our hands work the cordage
Of peace.

Joe Balaz

YOU AND I

Joe Balaz – vocal / poem, acoustic guitar, rhythm bass, lead bass

CONTRIBUTORS

Alva Andrews was a community activist and organizer, a cultural counselor for young people, and a teacher of Hawaiian healing practices that included the mind and body balance of lomilomi. He was also an artist, known for his striking pen and ink drawings.

Donovan Kūhiō Colleps is a Kanaka ʻŌiwi poet, fiction writer, and editor from Puʻuloa Oʻahu. He is the author of Proposed Additions, a collection of documentary poems about his grandfather. His poems have appeared on the podcast The Slowdown, in the online publication Poem-a Day, as well as in When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through, Poetry Magazine, and Indigenous Pacific Islander Eco-Literatures.

Dana Naone Hall is a poet and activist, who lives on the island of Maui. Her book Life of the Land Articulations of a Native Writer, is an American Book award winner from the Before Columbus Foundation. This year she was recognized as a “Champion of the Land” by the Hawaiian Islands Land Trust.

John Dominis Holt IV (1919-1993) was a Native Hawaiian writer, poet and cultural historian. In 1979, he was recognized as a Living Treasure of Hawai’i for his contributions to the Hawaiian culture. He is the author of several books with Hawaiian themes, such as Princess of the Night Rides and other tales and Waimea Summer: A Novel.

Kristiana Kahakauwila is a hapa writer of kanaka maoli (Native Hawaiian), Norwegian, and German descent. An associate professor at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, she has taught creative writing at Western Washington University, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and Kundiman, among others. She is the author of This Is Paradise: Stories.

Imaikalani Kalahele is a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) artist, activist, musician and poet. His artwork is well-known and has appeared in many art exhibitions in Hawai’i. He has also exhibited his creative work on the U.S. continent and internationally. Kalahele is the author of Kalahele, a book of his text poetry and art, and has also created improv music-poetry with a configuration of artists, activists, and musicians who became known as the Mokaki Band.

Kalehua Kim is a poet living in the Seattle area in the state of Washington. Born
of Hawaiian, Chinese, Filipino and Portuguese descent, her multicultural background
informs much of her work. Her poems have appeared in such publications as Calyx Journal, Denver Quarterly, and ‘Oiwi—A Native Hawaiian Journal.

Brandy Nālani McDougall is a Kanaka Maoli author, poet, educator, literary activist, and associate professor at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. She is the Hawai’i State Poet Laureate for 2023-2025, and is the author of The Salt-Wind, Ka Makani Pa’akai, a book of poetry.

Michael McPherson (1947-2008) was born in Hilo, moved with his parents to O’ahu in 1954, learned to surf at Waikiki, attended private and public schools, followed the
waves to Maui and Kaua’i, 1965-1970, and completed an M.A. in English at the University of Hawai’i in 1976. He was the first Fiction Editor for the Hawai’i Review in
1972 and a panelist at V Symposium International James Joyce in Paris in 1975. He founded Xenophobia Press in Wailuku in 1980 and published HAPA, a journal of
contemporary literature and literary criticism of Hawai’i, annually on April Fools Day. He is of Scottish, Irish, Norwegian and Hawaiian ancestry, descended from
nineteenth-century sailors and women of the islands.

The Mokaki Band was an improv band that did a lot of improvisational music-poetry with Imaikalani Kalahele, notable artist, poet, and activist. The band was a loose configuration of creative musicians, artists, and activists. Its band members consisted of a general lineup of Peter Chamberlain, Imaikalani Kalahele, Peter Kealoha, Chuck Souza, Greg Kekipi, and Sam Henderson. Over several years of jamming and recording together, some members may not have been present at all of the creative sessions. At times guest visitors also participated musically, and some of those creative moments were recorded as well. Mokaki created eight spontaneous albums of varied music, much of it featuring Kalahele’s improv poetry. Music genres such as Hawaiian, rhythm and blues, rock, jazz, reggae, fusion, folk, blues, country, and pop, including original music poetry works, and some original songs composed by its members, were explored in a spirit of fluid experimentation. Mokaki also performed at public presentations, such as gallery shows, bookstore events, and other special happenings in different venues.

Tamara Wong-Morrison is a founding member off “Ohana o Maha’ulepu, an organization that is working to preserve, for future generations, the irreplaceable natural and cultural resources of Mahaulepu, on the island of Kaua’i. “Aloha is Endangered” is the working title of Wong-Morrison’s collection of poems. She lives in Koloa on the island of Kaua’i.

Carl Pao— O’ahu born and raised. Pao is an internationally exhibited visual artist and arts educator living and working in U.S. occupied Hawai’i. He currently resides on
Moku o Keawe with his ‘ohana and reconnecting with his kupuna o ‘Ailā’au.

Christy Passion is a critical care nurse and poet. Her work has been featured by the Academy of American Poets, and has appeared in When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through, an anthology of Native Nations Poetry. She is the author of Still Out of Place, a book of poetry.

Craig Santos Perez is a Chamoru from Guahan (Guam). He is the author of six books of poetry and the co-editor of six anthologies. He also edited Navigating Chamoru Poetry, which won the MLA Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages in 2022. Perez is a professor in the English department at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.

Leialoha Apo Perkins (1930-2018) was born and raised in Lahaina, Maui, Hawai’i. She has authored several books, including Natural and other stories about contemporary Hawaiians and The Firemakers (short stories), along with Kingdoms of the Heart and Other Places in the Turnings of a Mind (poetry). In 2017, ‘Atenisi University in Tonga conferred on Perkins the honor of University Fellow. Perkins earned her BA from Boston University, her MA from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, and her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in Folklore and Folklife. Perkins was one of the few Hawaiian PhD’s of her era. In a long academic career she taught Anthropology and English Literature at ‘Atenisi University in Tonga, and Hawaiian Studies and Literature in the University of Hawai’i system.

Chuck Kawai’olu Souza Artist, Musician, Song Writer, Teacher, retired Firefighter. Hawaiian. E ola mau ka po’e maoli me kakou mau leo ma Polinekia a puni ka honua!
—translation: Long live the native people and our voices in Polynesia and around the world! Lava in Their Soul is a cd album of his original songs. Souza lives in Lihue,
on the island of Kaua’i in Hawai’i.

Lehua M. Taitano is a queer Chamoru writer and interdisciplinary artist from Yigu, Guåhan (Guam) and co-founder of Art 25: Art in the Twenty-fifth Century. She is the
author of two volumes of poetry—Inside Me an Island and A Bell Made of Stones. Her chapbook, appalachiapacific, won the Merriam-Frontier Award for short fiction. She has two chapbooks of poetry and visual art: Sonoma and Capacity.

Haunani-Kay Trask (October 3, 1949 – July 3, 2021) was a Native Hawaiian activist, educator, author, and poet. She served as one of the leaders of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement and was professor emeritus at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. She was a founder of the Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and served as its director for almost ten years. Trask published two books of poetry, Light in the Crevice Never Seen and Night Is a Sharkskin Drum. Her poetry was published widely in literary publications and anthologies.

Mahealani Wendt is a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) poet, writer and community activist residing in Hawai’i, on the island of Maui. In 1993 she was the recipient of the
Eliot Cades literary award for an emerging writer, and is the author of the poetry collection Uluhaimalama and other publications, She recently retired as the executive
director of the Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation, a public-interest law firm specializing in Kanaka Maoli rights. She has worked for Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation since 1978. Her poetry has been published widely in literary magazines and anthologies.

Maualaivao Albert Wendt is a Pacific Islander, and he is acknowledged internationally as one of the major novelists and poets from that broad
expanse of native islands. He lives in Aotearoa with his partner Reina Whaitiri.

Wayne Kaumualii Westlake (1947-1984), is an internationally published Native Hawaiian poet whose work continues to be exhibited and published worldwide. Westlake, Poems by Wayne Kaumualii Westlake, co-edited by Mei-Li Siy and Richard Hamasaki, was published by the University of Hawai’i Press. Westlake was an avid supporter of Native Hawaiian causes and issues, and his creative energy on such matters, was often channeled into his poetry, concrete poetry, essays, research, and editing.

13 MILES FROM CLEVELAND
Edited by Joe Balaz

Joe Balaz lives in Northeast Ohio in the city of Cleveland. He edited Ramrod- A Literary and Art Journal of Hawai’i, and was also the editor of Ho’omanoa: An Anthology of Contemporary Hawaiian Literature.

Editors note: Aloha. Imua i ka mana’o.

13 Miles from Cleveland was first created in Brecksville, Ohio in 2008, and is now based in Cleveland. This special issue from Northeast Ohio, features literature, art,
and music solely from Pacific Islanders. Now is the time to really ring a bell, that has never been rung before in this way east of the Mississippi River, regarding Hawai’i Nei, Cleveland, and all places beyond these two locations. This special Pacific Islanders Issue represents and speaks to a cultural exchange between Northeast Ohio and Hawai’i, and other Pacific Islander nations as well. In its unique creation it now spans across the Western expanse of a continent that was first discovered by indigenous Native American people, to fly like a tireless and indigenous Hawaiian Hawk above the long stretch of Pacific Ocean, to return and visit islands which were discovered by indigenous islanders who traveled by the stars. It is a cultural exchange that can now also be accessed by other locations around the world.

As if traversing on an unseen bridge high above the clouds, this special issue of 13 Miles from Cleveland bridges customs in a way, as it shares and offers what is forever known deep in the hearts and minds of people who live cultures that are still vibrantly alive.

Aloha. E mau, e mau, e mau . . .

All works appearing in 13 Miles from Cleveland are the sole property of their respective authors and artists, and may not be reproduced in any way or form without
their permission. © 2023