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Basket – The Missing Slate No'u Revilla">
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Literature, PoetryOctober 1, 2017

Basket

Nuclear Hemmorhage: Enewetak Does Not Forget
Watercolour and thread, 2017
Joy Enomoto
Image courtesy of the artist

for Kathy

She brings her host a basket:
earrings, mats, testimony
This basket, she says, is medicine.
Some may ask: what is a basket to a bomb?
Why bring medicine when they send ships    bombing
                     their laps
                     to jellyfish
They didn’t know what to call them, she said.
They didn’t know the name.
this ocean
     an open wound
  but who gives a damn
moonlight scorched from wombs
who gives a damn
who gives a damn
  who gets to damn who
              She brings her host a basket
Then, bone by bone
her low tide lips
       reveal the names
    her gods & wayfinders
    her mother & country
       her island sea
        This is a basket of names,
                                  a basket of stories.
For afterbirths
of fallout –
war-petalled &
sacred-starving,
her story is the medicine we ache for.
~ No‘u Revilla
Noʻu Revilla is a queer Polynesian poet and educator. Born and raised on the island of Maui, she has performed and facilitated creative writing workshops throughout Hawaiʻi as well as in Canada, Papua New Guinea, and the United Nations in New York. Her work has been exhibited at the Honolulu Museum of Art and has appeared in Poetry, Black Renaissance Noire, Hawaiʻi Review, Anglistica, and Poem of the Week by Kore Press. Her chapbook ‘Say Throne’ was published by Tinfish Press in 2011, and she is currently finishing her PhD in creative writing at the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa.

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Joy EnomotoNo'u RevillaPacific Climate Change Poetrypoetry

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Greetings from the future!

 

With COVID-19 taking the world by storm and news channels everywhere hitting us with waves of negativity, we at The Missing Slate recognize the importance of creativity and the arts, especially their impact on mental health. As the world sits indoors and in some areas, cautiously starts to re-enter life, they do so knowing that things might never go completely back to “normal”. That “normal” is the watchword.

 

Over the coming weeks, long-time readers will notice things starting to change as the magazine pivots focus and direction. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. For now, we can say only that we’re coming back. That we’ve been hibernating for long enough and that the world needs some positivity and reasons to hope amidst all the doom and gloom.

 

Stay tuned!

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Praise Song for Oceania

"praise your rainbow/ warrior & peace/ boat / your hokuleʻa/ & sea shepherd..." A Pacific climate change poem, by Craig...

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