Ask the Brindled

ʻŌiwi, or Native Hawaiian, poet No‘u Revilla’s new collection, Ask the Brindled, returns again and again to the Hawaiian word “mo‘o,” which the poet defines as, among other things, “Shapeshifting water protector, lizard, woman, deity,” “Story, tradition, legend,” and “Brindled, of the skin, markings on those who feed and protect.” “Mo‘o” also relates to family succession and a “beloved grandchild,” and these poems, always preoccupied with skin and the body, flesh out these connotations and their connections. 

In “My grandma tells,” the shapeshifting speaker’s grandmother describes the ways people might react to her “mo‘o,” or lizard-deity form, and warns her to “watch out” for: 

                                                 […] The ones 
with the eyes. Sometimes they’re worse. They know 
where you hide your tail. Duct-taped to your thigh,
beneath your dress, throbbing. Only they can say I 
love you. They see what happens at night when
the dress comes off. They who see & do not run.

In the sonnet “Kino,” the speaker begins in “mo‘o” form—“I have traveled from Maui a lizard,” and shifts back into a woman’s body as the poem culminates in an erotic encounter:

[…] arrived, I eat
transforming in the forest of your grand-
mother’s memory: from lizard: woman
dreaming: licking tattoo: permission land:

skin. Traveling the night of your kino
to sleep your thighs, ho‘āo, ho‘āo, and wake.

Revilla writes, of this poem: “this sonnet participates in a tradition of Indigenous queer critique in Hawai‘i that links aloha ʻāina and erotic sovereignty.” Throughout Ask the Brindled, this conflation of the intimate and the political, an embodied queer, decolonial critique is powerfully manifest in the poems’ visceral imagery, their fluidity between English and the Hawaiian language, and in Revilla’s formal strategies. Particularly noteworthy is Revilla’s haunting series of “Erasure triptychs,” which present texts, erasures, and commentary on the erasures, and which brought to mind Solmaz Sharif’s writing on the form (which she calls “the most blatantly political forms of late”). In one erasure note, Revilla writes:

Erasure poetry is not extractive     flesh in battle.     This new ground has a name.
Imagine a reader protecting this land.