Deserving

He runs the gun down my sternum 

wrists pressed against my breasts

the ink sharp from the lip of the gun’s hum.

Exhale only when he loosens. Carrie captures

all of this on film. Photos failing to 

snap my ancestors guiding his hand

down my chest.

I ask him about Rihanna,

and he tells me his friend was pressured

into doing it. She makes a new tattoo appointment

once she returns to America, to cover up 

the indigenous ink she received here

and I’m reminded of my own unworthiness

that I sometimes throw in the backseat 

of my pride. She didn’t deserve that tatau. 

I get that. 

I plan to get my malu one day, but I just don’t feel 

like I deserve it yet, I tell him

as his body is still pressed against mine,

his precision below my chin, steady and solemn.

I find it interesting, he says, when people say 

they don’t feel like they     ‘deserve’ their malu.

To me, your malu feels like your birthright   no? 

I swallow without speaking. 

My breath held captive 

in his indigenous hands.

Between each buzz of the gun’s mouth 

on my indigenous skin. 

 

Credit

Copyright © 2020 by Terisa Siagatonu. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 30, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“I was in Aotearoa (indigenous name for New Zealand) when I was gifted this poem’s tattoo from an indigenous tattoo artist and wrote this poem. In our Pacific Islander culture, the tatau (tattoo) is a sacred, ceremonial part of our identity. As a Sāmoan-American writer who exists in diaspora, living up to the meaning of these markings on my skin—as well as in my writing—is a heavy, ancestral responsibility that I oftentimes doubt I am equipped to do. So to have the artist tell me that receiving my malu (a Sāmoan tattoo commonly given to women as a cultural rite of passage in her life) is my birthright shifted something in my understanding of my indigeneity as an indigenous poet existing in diaspora. Above all: it solidified it.”

—Terisa Siagatonu