Welcome to Pāʻia

215 Baldwin Ave, so many cane spiders in that house. Best place
we have ever and will ever live, mom and I still agree. Only time
I ever had my own bedroom and I cherished it deeply, walls glossed
with pages from seventeen and free surf, disposable photos, metallic stickers,
reef ads with girls in thongs, that was our aesthetic back then, oiled skin
with barely any clothing still in vogue there and always will be.
I remember Ice Creams and Dreams but just barely. My ex’s mom
waitressed at Charley’s back when motorcycles parked behind it
where the fights broke out. Mom worked at Bangkok Thai which
became Jacques then sat empty, that plant-filled patio, remember
how the sun dappled the dining room floor. If you passed by now
you wouldn’t recognize it. If you never stepped foot in the old General Store
don’t talk to me about Pāʻia. Although those who came before might argue
that I’ve no claim to it either. But I remember when you could still park there,
everyone hanging out car windows talking to each other, it’s still like that
in a way, I painted a self-portrait of a younger me in a pink and white dress
with ponytails at the PYCC, sliced my toe on the edge of a mirror there
and bled everywhere, rollerbladed the dull basketball court, worked
the skatepark once it was built, picking songs and renting helmets,
bought iced coffee from Anthony’s when I was just learning to drink it,
gas station lighters and chicken katsu, shave ice back before the shave ice places
got gentrified, walked down Baldwin Ave in a bikini top, the boys driving trucks
up and down the hill and honking their horns. We didn’t like it but liked
something about it at the same time. Illusions of escape melted on the horizon
like surf wax. Those are those million-dollar sunsets everyone comes here to see.
Strolling past old Civics with towels blocking out their windows, the gravel lot
at Pāʻia Bay, I still go whenever I’m back home. Why do you always park here,
my sister asks, but she was too young then, wouldn’t understand, tourists
still get spooked when they turn in and we like it that way, stay the fuck out,
the sneakers on the phone lines tell you so, the brown boys staring you down
from behind sunglasses, the encampment tucked into the bushes past the halfpipe.
Developers measured cane fields we gazed upon from backs of trucks as if
our kingdom that could never be changed. It was a stolen kingdom, that much
was true, but the rest we thought little of. How quickly a fence can go up.
How quickly power changes hands. Even the men who preyed on our bodies
we mistook for lost boys, hopped into lifted trucks, glancing at tattoos
but not really reading them. Sometimes I wonder how I was ever able to feel so free.
That’s what a lack of politics can get you. Chasing one day to another, one high
to another, so much seemed immutable, far away a thing impossible to imagine.
Sometimes when we drank too much we spoke of our fathers, but not often, mostly
played Fergie and Mike Jones and west coast hip hop and Hawai’i reggae, Fiji, Ekolu,
Ooklah the Moc, sped deep into country with no business behind the wheel,
hearts sketched in our notebooks, wrong lyrics at the tops of our lungs–
when we sped through the tunnel on the Pali, even the driver shut their eyes.

Lei La the canoe speaks

Lacquered, gleaming with seafoam paint
I sit outside the waterfront restaurant.
Columns of palms stand guard in sand
as I wait for the neighborhood children to come.
From the cove below they zip towards me,
pluck flowers from glossy stems
duck behind rocks, bloody their knees
climbing inside me with bodies of sun.
Folded into my almost-womb
they point ahead, pretend to paddle
toward the north star glittering their route.
Something deep within me sings loudly.
O joy of days, when I am transformed
from a dead, waxed ornament on sand.
Here on this beach, where dry fronds
drop from the palms and fill me.
Something like a mother, I can sense
the footsteps quicken on the path
when the keepers of the restaurant
break from grinning at tourists to shout
and the children scamper away like mice
back towards the slippery reef.
If I could, I would tell them to push me
from the sand of the cove
and let me drift. It grows dark, I am alone.
Save for the roaches who skitter
and nest along my belly’s cool floor.
Come back, come back, small brown gods
crowned with sweat and life. The honeysuckle
you behead to drink nectar from
cries for your familiar arrival.