At first I thought the pileated woodpecker
that lifted up from the yard as we came home
from a walk in the woods, flapping
away on long black wings that curved
up at the tips and flashed white
underneath, might be a visitation
Morning wind speaks a dialect of smoke,
brings news from yesterday and tomorrow:
what’s burning there will soon enough burn here.
One bullet. Even a rumor of bullet
restless in the chamber of a neighbor’s gun.
To run, before he arrives with his god.
By AMALIA BUENO
This poem is excerpted from Eh, No Talk Li’dat.
Eh, No Talk Li’Dat, an anthology forthcoming from Kaya Press, is centered on Pidgin, or Hawai‘i Creole English. The following poem is excerpted from this anthology.
Pidgin began as a dialect of trade between Native Hawaiians and Western seafarers and merchants and evolved as a Creole language in the sugar plantations in the 1920s and ’30s, yet, until today, it is deemed substandard by school administrators and is not recognized as a Creole language by the State Department of Education. It is the only language I can think of in the U.S. that was co-authored by the various ethnic groups in the islands: Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders (Samoa, Tonga), sugar planters and migrant laborers from Asia (China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines), Portugal (Madeira and the Azores), and Puerto Rico. Recent speakers and innovators of Pidgin include transplants from Micronesia. In addition to the poems, stories, and excerpted plays, all written in Pidgin and contributed by over forty of Hawai‘i’s writers, the genre-defying Eh, No Talk Li’Dat includes archival materials, newspaper articles, transcripts of televised comic skits, and comic strips.
After Hart Crane’s “At Melville’s Tomb”
Da ocean like us know we all going die.
She stay keeping all our bones.
I seen da wave take ’em
den bring ’em to da shore
den take ’em back out again.
Plenny bones,
and inside da bones—mana.1
One day, da ocean all quiet,
da waves all calm, den alla sudden
all kapakahi.2
Da waves wen straight up,
alla way up,
up to da sky
fo’ real kine was all spiritual like
like I was at church
and everybody all quiet.
I wen3 look up
up at da stars, and das when,
inside da stars
I seen all da bones
all da answers
to everything.
Our fren Herman,
way up high in da blue waves
he not evah going come back.
Way up high,
his bones, his mana
da ocean stay keeping ’em
so lucky da ocean
fo’ keep Herman fo’ evah
cause only she can.
—
Amalia Bueno is an educator and writer based in Honolulu. Her poems and stories have been published by Bamboo Ridge, Hawaii Pacific Review, and Philippine American Literary House, among others. Her literary interests include Pinay poetry, decolonization, and Hawai‘i Creole English. Her poetry chapbook, Home Remedies, was published in 2015.
Some descended from the arms
of our chapel cross, while lower
brothers abandoned statues
to bathe and drink at the heart
of our campus. Here, this flock
is no congress, no murder—
too innocent for such names.
By SEAN CHO A.
in the absence of wind: stillness of course.
the slowness of the leaves is a reminder
of the importance of scale. of time. scale
of time. the stillness in the branches becomes
By L. S. KLATT
my mother died, & I
was moth, my body
alert with warning
coloration. Instar,
I cut myself
out & started
again. I couldn’t
possibly have been
Atlas, colossal,
camouflaging
By MERYL ALTMAN
—after Pindar, Olympian Ode #1
Water is best; and gold, which shines like fire
burning at night, says this is a very rich man
like nothing else does; and when you need
an image for the thrill of victory, what could be
stronger than the sun? there can, one supposes,
be poems about the moon, or a good loaf of bread,
but no one searches the empty daytime sky
for any fainter star when the sun is shining;
We watch the trees the way we watch the birds,
sitting more quietly than we have to,
though trees do not respond to sudden motion,
a crossing fox, a knock on the window,
or anything less momentous than the day.
My freedom is not
to answer the phone
or open the door. I don’t care
if I’m not liked anymore.
I’m free to be that, disliked, to sweat
to be that—take flight, from like or dislike.
—for Joseph O. Legaspi
And when you whispered under your mask, I don’t think I can stand these two young lovers, bright as the low winter sun shining through the dingy subway car windows, I knew what you meant: maskless, giggling, boy holding girl by the waist, taking selfies on a gray seat made for two. We sat across, letting their tenderness reflect on us: her back to his chest making a hearth of their bodies while the train snakes its turn over the elevated tracks. Hi-rises loom over gentrified streets, the graffitied walls, a sign for $0.99 pizza—how old neighborhoods create a new belonging. Nothing jostles these two as they attend to their own happiness, not the train’s hard lurch, its rumble and squeal, this couple at the beginning of their desires, you turning to me with your brown eyes in the day’s last light as we approach our final stop.
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