Live Again
by Kalilinoe Detwiler
Make nō ke kalo a ola i ka palili.
The taro may die but lives on in the young plants that it produces.
Pukui #2107
My grandmother of a thousand hands quilts my skin with her dreams.
This skin tans in the dark aside the fires of her memories. When she opens the photobook to select which piece of paper to patch over my knee, the spine cackles with the kind of life that consumes coal from the inside-out.
When grandmother dreams
I see the mountains of her childhood. A woman, a baby, a house. She remembers names and places. When she doesn’t remember I listen anyway. A breath, a sigh, a hum. Collections of morning winds from her travels. With a cluck of her tongue,
She pinches a photo into the crescent of my elbow
and I see chickens being chased across the red dirt path, the gecko hiding in the holes that they dig out with twigs. Neighborhood kids dare each other to stay out past the whistle to come home. Even now her ears
She places the mountain road to her grandma’s house between my toes.
Rubs it in like wheat gum into a split bamboo stick she once used as a net to catch butterflies and dragonflies and paper memories hung from overall hems like dandelions
The stitch under my knee is cold.
with sweat collected from the back of her neck as she rode horse with a lover in Honokaa. She loved Honokaa. If the lover hadn’t died she might have lived there. This memory might have taught me to control my weight on horseback instead of cupping my tendons as a granny square.
Sinewed to my scalp are songs of sisters and islands.
I witnessed the throw of berries into Tutu’s lap. Around my wrists she tethers afterimages of her fights with the lover. Do not dare tell grandmother how to caress her own lands, how to nest in my veins, how to use her severed black tongue as she inscribes the scent of her kuahiwi down my leg.
When grandma of many hands and names and mountains
is finished with her work, she closes the book and discards the frames.
she grounds her existence with two hands on my shoulders, the sulfur of her cigarette gives me strength. I am her resistance. My pieced together history is sutured whole. When I walk her footsteps crack red canyons in their temporary overthrow. Why didn’t she say anything? She waited centuries to speak about the chickens and the lover and the road.
Dear Grandma,
Can we pretend your mountain and mine have witnessed each other’s childhood through our hands? Can I continue the tradition of crafting new bodies for our stories, so that 4000 miles and 80 years away we can pretend to descend a fading road with wild fruits on our tongue? With our mountains as a net, can we snare memories of dragonfly wings? Can we live again in the darkness of our throats, our breath –– a tug of dawn, a morning wind?
Grandma, I’ve stolen your seam ripper.
Poised it above the threads in my palm. For you I rip this skin square by square to lay the first patch upon my granddaughter's hand. With the landscapes of your memories shared between our skins, we invoke you, live again.