wet & let

How do you mark beginnings in your creative practice?

Who do you turn to for grounding and inspiration?

In the beginning, what makes you feel most alive?

As I embark on my second book, I commit to an epistolary practice with people who not only create walkable ground toward freedom but also conjure and make accessible parts of me that I didn’t know (or am too scared or stressed to know) I could feel the world with. Write a list of people who do this for you - not just writers but relatives, teachers, artists, activists, farmers, healers, or absolute strangers. Write a letter of gratitude to one of these people and try your best to send it. If this person cannot receive a physical letter, recite your gratitude out loud. What would happen if you wrote a letter like this once a month? What would this epistolary practice make possible?

To begin my practice, I reach for my mentor and beloved ʻŌiwi scholar, activist, educator, and “slyly / reproductive” poet Haunani-Kay Trask.

When the Rain Comes

Haunani-Kay Trask

When the rain comes

put down your glass

leave the flowers

and go into the marsh.

Let her winds find

you and the great gray

clouds roll down around

you.

Let the smoke fill up

your eyes and the mist

wet your breasts

then fling off your

last piece of colored cloth

that she may see

and take you.

Dear Haunani,

I miss you. The ʻĀpuakea rain kept coming this morning. I did as you say…walked to the water without glass, without flowers, and watched her come for Kaʻelepulu at a slant. As the rain came, I recited your poem. “L” sounds ripple through the stanzas, relentless: leave, let, let, fill, fling, last piece of colored cloth. The erotic doesn’t hide. Moe aku, moe mai, you’d always say. Yet there is no body if it’s disconnected from wai. There is no body if it’s disconnected from ʻāina. When ʻŌiwi insist on the integrity of our lands and waters, we insist on the integrity of our own bodies in relation. Joseph M. Pierce reminds us: “Our flourishing is non-negotiable.” I’ve been flinging myself at this poem ever since you became an ancestor. It’s the non-negotiable link you trace between wet and let: Who do I let find me (truly)? What do I let fill me up? What makes me wet? What keeps me wet? Fear of desire creates nothing, but separates everything. I write to be closer. How I do and do not earn this closeness is worth studying. Mahalo for your relentlessness. Mahalo for wet and let.

me ka na’au ha’aha’a, Noʻu

slow & mahalo