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My ancestors ride wit me.
They twerk on the roof of the Uber
as I’m pulling up late to the party.
They gas me full tank and
yas me in the mirror
as I summon them out of me with
my mascara wands and glitter and
every time I draw my eyes on
Nana you encourage me
to keep my chin lifted upwards,
my eyes filling up with stars.
I know I walk on
salt blood water tears.
I know the earth has been
beaten down and made gangsta
but sometimes, e hoas,
I just want to party.
My ancestors ride wit me.
Don’t tell me what they would do.
I know them better than you.
I sat in the lap of my great-grandmother
until the flax of her couldn’t take it.
So she unraveled herself and
wrapped around me like a blanket
and at her touch the privilege of me
was a headrush as I remembered
making dresses out of sugar packets,
my bro getting blown up in Forlì,
my grandfather commemorated under one tree
even though he forced himself into our bloodline
and then abandoned me and me and me.
My mother saying go
marry a white man
you deserve better
so I left
the bone leftovers of home
knowing that in two generations I’d be called
an Oreo and my teeth painted into red brick,
two mouthfuls of red roots and boiling water
for dinner, for almost every dinner, so
when I’m out with my mans eating
an expensive hunk of whatever
my ancestors and I share
the same taste and you can see it
in our smile so forceful it splits
the space-time continuum.
Weird flex I know. They taught me that
the entire universe is malleable and mine to mold.
Let me mold it in their image.
My ancestors ride wit me.
Don’t you dare tell me what they would do.
I know them way better than you.
I’ve known them
since they were a 5-year-old
who was told on her first day
she couldn’t play because
she wasn’t the right color
but the other kids didn’t know
that she was actually a witch,
a direct descendant
of tohunga and had
transformative powers
and in that instance
their hex became a spell
and it changed her into
an immortal thing,
a jaw, a whale, a knot
made from her grandmother’s hair,
and in that moment
she realized that life
was not going to be fair
but it could be
ferocious and forming
if she surrendered herself
to the brown, crying, clay.
She knew that one day
she would make something,
puoro, gourd, vessel, body
of water impossible enough
to carry them all.
My ancestors ride wit me.
Don’t tell me wtf they would do.
I know them way better than you
and I know the wild
variety of things
they had to do
to get me here,
some voluntary,
some forced,
not all of them
tika or textbook,
postcard or pretty,
but God!
Aren’t you infatuated
with the nerve they had
to imagine me
and make it happen?
You can’t tell me that
my existence isn’t anything
but the existence of our old magic,
our old ways, our bloodlines,
our trust in the river,
when we first hopped in that
souped-up waka
and looked up at the stars like
u got me? And they said
hard
so now
I’m harder than a scrum of mountains.
I’m current like I’m water.
I whip like the wgtn wind and
I’m hotter than the sun.
And my ancestors ride wit me
like dawgs. When I whistle
they run and run and run.
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