A Family Secret is a Wound Deferred
by Noelani Piters
Detail of photograph by Danielle Shandiin Emerson
Pīkake that scents the air
but cannot be found. Half moon.
The hunched lope of a three-legged dog.
I want to tell her—there are some things
you can never take back.
The wind pushing low-slung
clouds across the sky.
Who gave Hannah Kala‘i her name?
Perhaps it was her mother, Victoria,
‘Ōiwi wahine of stolen land—
because she was, supposedly, incapable,
incompetent. Because this is a pattern.
After the rain has stopped,
eyes closed against the dewlight,
whistle through drysocket.
No one living today knew
that my great-grandfather Libert
and his children could imu a pig.
The photographs we find prove otherwise.
The shape of a native bird now silent.
A scar that could never heal.
My distant relative traces our Chinese roots
back fifty generations. When is an end
a beginning?
I want to look at the tree that knows itself,
build a life with paper and ink.
To remember correctly,
I must always look at the tree.
Hannah Kala‘i held ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i
snug on her tongue. None of her
fourteen children spoke it fluently—
a word here, a word there.
Other things, too, were swallowed.
They scratch at my throat.
Stemming from trillionness
an abundance waning,
blood conscious crescent.
I still in the shellsound.
Noelani Piters is a writer living in San Francisco. A recipient of fellowships from Indigenous Nations Poets, VONA, and PEN America, she was a finalist for the 2025 James Welch Prize and the 2024 Disquiet Literary Prize in poetry. Noelani was a 2023 Molokai Arts Center Artist in Residence and has received scholarships and support from Sundress Academy for the Arts, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Juniper Summer Writing Institute, and Kearny Street Workshop. Her work can be found in or is forthcoming from Zyzzyva, Poetry Northwest, The Hopkins Review, Poetry, swamp pink, Pleiades, and elsewhere.