A poem of girlhood and after by Indigenous New Zealander Tayi Tibble, whose second collection, Rangikura, comes out in America today. In the dictionary of Māori language, hōmiromiro is defined as “a white-breasted North Island tomtit…a little black-and-white bird with a large head and short tail.” It is often used to refer to someone with a tomtit’s keen vision—that is, a sharp eye for detail.
Hōmiromiro
I used to dream about a two-headed goldfish. I took it for an omen. I smashed a milk bottle open
on a boiling road and watched a three-legged dog lick it up and in the process I became not myself but a single shard of glass and thought finally
I had starved myself skinny enough to slip into the splits of the universe but once I did I realised that the universe was no place for a young thing to be and there is always a lot more starving to be had.
When I was a girl I thought
I was Daisy Buchanan. I read on the train. I made voluminous eyes.
Once I walked in front of a bus and it exploded into a million monarch butterflies then I was ecstatic!
As a girl, I could only fathom
time as rose petals falling down my oesophagus. It tickled and it frightened me. I ran around choking for attention.
I had projections of myself at 100 my neck weathered and adorned like the boards of a home being eaten by the earth.
When I was a girl I would lie
on the side of that road in the last lick of sun and wait for the rabbits to come saluting the sky of orange dust
and then I would shoot them into outer space.
For many years I watched them bouncing on the moon. But then I stopped caring and so I stopped looking.
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Learn more about Rangikura by Tayi Tibble.
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Hear Tayi Tibble and Harryette Mullen read from their new poetry collections at Beyond Baroque in Los Angeles, CA on April 10 at 8:00 PM. Tayi Tibble will be joined by Sasha LaPointe in Washington for a series of readings and conversations at Elliot Bay Book Company in Seattle on April 13 at 7:00 PM, at King's Books in Tacoma on April 14 at 1:00 PM, at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art in Bainbridge on April 15 at 7:00 PM, and at Third Place Books in Seattle, Lake Forest Park, on April 16 at 7:00 PM. Tayi and Sasha will also be at Broadway Books in Portland, OR, on April 17 at 6:00 PM. Tayi will be at the LA Times Book Festival signing books at the ALTA booth (Booth 111) on April 20 at 11:00 AM.
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