*Please note: This poem went out with an incorrect title. This is the correct title. We apologize for the error!
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s preview coverage of Miami Book Fair (MBF) 2022! The poets whose work you’ll be reading every weekday from October 15 through November 15 are just a few of the many authors from around the world participating in this year’s MBF, the nation’s largest gathering of writers and readers of all ages. They all look forward to sharing their work, thoughts, and ideas both in person and online. Between November 13-20, new poet conversations and readings will be launched and available for free on miamibookfaironline.com (in addition to other content). For more information, visit the website and follow MBF on Instagram and Twitter at @miamibookfair and use the hashtag #miamibookfair2022.
I. To fit a lizard, the jaw of this dress unlocks. Fitting sounds like eating, and mothers tell their daughter to shut their eyes. Imagine pins inside the unmarried, pins to decorate the insides of a church. Girls wear dresses that mothers sew for them. this dress //// flag //// shroud In the 1800s my greatgreatgreatgreat grand mothers swam to ships to trade sex for cloth, iron, and mirrors. Did you see yourself in their glass, mother? Did you cut the shape of your body and send it whistling through the ocean? When a cliff becomes altar and the Pacific in the name of civilization is properly dressed daughters inside pine away the altitude of faith. II. Inside the dress, there is a creature, she careful is a cliff in a girl’s body. And the cliff was a lizard once still turned to rock she gazed too much like she careful had a kingdom inside. Inside the dress, holes are cut so the cliff can breathe and any girl watching any girl waiting any glint of a girl’s mother’s metal scissors can still find her— careful there are still pins inside.
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 Poetry Journal, 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.
Copyright © 2022 by Noʻu Revilla. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions.
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