i wonder


i wonder if my mokopuna
will know how much i hated
my hairy chest and
roman nose

i wonder if they will remember
how when I was 12
i plucked off the whiskers
above my upper lip
till the skin bled

i wonder if they will know all the times
i looked up my iwi
cause i didn’t know how to spell it

i wonder if they will know
how i never felt Māori enough
how i never felt quite
anything
enough

i wonder if
when i am dust in the dirt
or in an urn on their mantle
they will feel
everything
i
felt

i wonder if they will think me an ancestor
or
just some broken words from an archived website
or
a few pixels in a cracked phone screen
made up of
red and green and blue
light

Featured photo by Ben Girven.


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