Hana Pera Aoake
Mouth full of ulcers
Ice shards in the library
Dreams of swimming in pools
Following straight black lines forever
Part fish, part amphibian
Daughter of Tangaroa
Skin laced with mucous
Like a snake birthing eggs by choking them out through its mouth
Like an embryonic calf falling to the ground
Struggling to stand up
Static down my back
Waking up in a birthing pod
As a simulation, organism, vibration
Ancestry tests stealing my DNA and selling it to big pharma
I want a boy to perform a haka for me
The height of romance
Myopically dystopian
The politics of disappointment
Too little and too much sleep
Learning through the skin
Acts of decolonisation
Disappointment, error, imperfection
Rāhui on everything
Wheezing breath, fluid rupturing my lungs
Swirling around and tightening and strangling my chest
My waiwhero comes and flows back into Papatūānuku
When I smile I have too many teeth
He used to say I looked like
Julia Roberts, an American sweetheart
Me, a New Zealand sweetheart
Dreams of saving a family friend from drowning in my Kirwan Kudas togs aged eight
Sweating in cold water
Scraping our feet on the concrete pool floor
Rusty nails ripping through tendons
I will survive by Gloria Gaynor plays on the bus
I use a placenta serum with a picture of a sheep on it by a brand called ‘Merino’ written in gold cursive
I want to be 100% pure New Zealand
Colonial monuments that reveal and conceal
Aotearoa is a limitless space
Potency is an energy, an ungovernable body
Plural, infinite
New Zealand is the orange bubbling
Limited always by the impossibility of undoing the past
Singular, finite
My body feels like a protest
An act of deviance,
A difference that can never be reconciled
By existing I will continue to be heard
In my ngākau, a taniwha stirs
Waikato green
My āhua glows
The kawakawa is different here
Waikato green
Less holes, more distinct lines
Fumbling up into the ribcage
Sharp pains
Cracking open the eggshells
A poi swings like an umbilical cord
Fluid
Perpetually in motion
