When You Say “Protestors” instead of Protectors by Noʻu Revilla
When You Say “Protestors” instead of Protectors
Noʻu RevillaI would call it a trick, if it wasn’t so terrifying, the way your mouth doesn’t move when you speak. Your smile, shiny as a church, but what kind of prayer could ever be trusted without evidence of a free tongue? On the rare occasion sound shakes loose, words, no matter how unmuzzled, words still go to die. In your mouth, even womb is wound. Sometimes I dream of tearing your throat wide open and finding there, where stories should be born, only bleeding bleedingbleeding. The wish to desecrate. We are, yet again, portrayed by you,
the girlthe Native the waterthe mountain who was “asking for it.” Your lips so Sunday still. Sometimes I almost believe you. So it’s best I keep hiding knives in my hair, the way my grandmother – not god – the way my grandmother intended.
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SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in Ask the Brindled by Noʻu Revilla, published by Milkweed Editions, 2022. (Available direct from Milkweed Editions • Also on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“Ask the Brindled, selected by Rick Barot as a winner of the 2021 National Poetry Series, bares everything that breaks between “seed” and “summit” of a life—the body, a people, their language. It is an intergenerational reclamation of the narratives foisted upon Indigenous and queer Hawaiians—and it does not let readers look away.
In this debut collection, No‘u Revilla crafts a lyric landscape brimming with shed skin, water, mo‘o, ma‘i. She grips language like a fistful of wet guts and inks the page red—for desire, for love, for generations of blood spilled by colonizers. She hides knives in her hair “the way my grandmother—not god— / the way my grandmother intended,” and we heed; before her, “we stunned insects dangle.” Wedding the history of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi with contemporary experiences of queer love and queer grief, Revilla writes toward sovereignty: linguistic, erotic, civic. Through the medium of formal dynamism and the material of ʻŌiwi culture and mythos, this living decolonial text both condemns and creates.
Ask the Brindled is a song from the shattered throat that refuses to be silenced. It is a testament to queer Indigenous women who carry baskets of names and stories, “still sacred.” It is a vow to those yet to come: “the ea of enough is our daughters / our daughters need to believe they are enough.”” (Source)
ABOUT NOʻU REVILLA
Noʻu Revilla is an ʻŌiwi (Hawaiian) poet and educator. Born and raised on Maui, she prioritizes aloha, collaboration, and gratitude in her practice. Her debut book Ask the Brindled (Milkweed Editions, 2022) was a winner of the 2021 National Poetry Series. Revilla teaches creative writing at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She served as the Guest Editor of Poem-a-Day in May 2024. (Source)
Read more poems by Noʻu Revilla • Find books by this poet on Amazon • Bookshop • Website • Or view my library
ENDNOTES
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