Noʻu Revilla is the author of Ask the Brindled. She is an ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) queer poet and educator. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Poetry, Literary Hub, ANMLY, Beloit, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress. Her latest chapbook, Permission to Make Digging Sounds,was published in Effigies III in 2019, and she has performed throughout Hawaiʻi as well as Canada, Papua New Guinea, and the United Nations. She is an assistant professor at the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa, where she teaches creative writing with an emphasis on ʻŌiwi literature, spoken word, and decolonial poetics. Born and raised in Waiʻehu on the island of Maui, she currently lives and loves in the valley of Pālolo on the island of Oʻahu.

I.

Definitions of moʻo 1-3

Maunakea

About the effects of shedding skin

Welcome to the gut house

Eggs

He moʻo, he wahine

Kino

Moʻolelo is the theory

My grandma tells

Memory as missionary position

How to swallow a colonizer

Catalogue of gossip, warnings & other talk of moʻo, aka an ʻōiwi abecedarian

Don’t have sex with gods

When you say “protestors” instead of “protectors”

II.

Definitions of moʻo 4-6

Iwi hilo means thigh bone means core of one’s being

Maui county fair

In search of a different ending

I. Summer with funeral & booze

II. Summer with funeral & playing house

III. Summer with funeral & 3 a.m.

Mercy

Ex is a verb

After she leaves you, femme

Lessons in quarantine

So sacred, so queer

Adze-shaped rain

III.

Erasure triptych: ʻai

Sirens out

Erasure triptych: aloha

IV.

Definitions of moʻo 7-8

Thirst traps

Myth bitch

Getting ready for work

For sisters who pray with fire

Dirtiest grand

The opposite of dispossession is not possession; it is connection

The ea of enough

Fire in Mākena

Recovery, Waikīkī

New patient form—medical history—creative option

Preparing Kaʻuiki

Basket

Shapeshifters banned, censored, or otherwise shit-listed, aka chosen family poem

Notes

Mahalo