Lehua Leong

The first God is the Mother.

It’s the god-thing sat across from you on the train to Boston. Dressed in thick red cotton, legs
crossed and spilling out— over— into the too small aisle.  Dark,
ash-struck curls.

It’s pulling your knees up to your chest to accommodate. She stretches her feet forward with a
groan, taking what you offer unrepentantly. Why shouldn’t she? You offered.

Somewhere not here, 
Pele is rolling her great tongue from her mouth again. 
All teeth and mouth, consuming.

The god-thing is a proud vulture. Neither of you will go hungry while she lives.

It’s pressing yourself into a different shape, and her foot brushing your thigh, now,
body extended awkwardly across the whole aisle.
She needs to see how much you will let her get away with. She has been training you out of
letting since the day you were born.

A voice on the speaker: Technical difficulties. Forgive us, please. We're sorry. Please.

ʻĀ, says the god-thing. ʻĀ lākou. 

Kākou, you say,
and she wheezes laughing. 

You look out the window at the tracks, who are begging to be swallowed up by something bigger
than themselves. 

Somewhere not here,
trees black down to the root like ashed cigarettes standing on their heads.
All the world consumed by one great, burning mouth. 

In your head his teeth are coins. In your head his coins are red.

The train shudders its way through more smoke. Air in this part of the world stings you and pulls
the water from your eyes, collecting gummy and thick and hot at the base of your tongue.

It is even worse for her. Her shoulders narrow into points.
For the first time you wonder how your body ever came from hers. She is small
now. Smaller than you have ever known her to be. 

It’s, Pēlā nō. He kino ke kino. He puka i hōʻōʻō iho ai ka ʻuhane. He mea. Pēlā nō. Pēlā nō.

It’s a clenched fist made woman. It’s adoring her from across the tentative aisle and the red dress
and the tinny speaker. 

It's you crawling out of her mouth, fully formed. It’s the fact that you didn’t. You tugged yourself
free in bits and pieces which got stuck between her teeth. It’s the something pink and gory you
left behind. It's that you still let too much. She keeps telling you to stop even as she wiggles her
toes in between your calf and your thigh. 

It’s relentless, to be here with her as the world is burning. Here, on this train, studying the
window for latches. It’s realizing you wouldn’t jump if you could. 

It's never turning your face from your mother-god and her shark-black eye. 

It’s learning to love the world violently and without its consent. 

It's finished, it’s sleeping. It’s dead.

It’s waking up.

Whalefall in the sugar ditch.

Our mango skins dissolve
float aching
both sides mudbanked & mudflanked by
something syrupy, black. Men watch. 

Pinkskinned nothings overhead
bending down
languid arms 

like branches.

What would our tūtūnui name her,
if they had watched the fall? Mea lele iho.
Puhia koholā. Ē koholā ē, e hele iho mai.

My friend, this body
banked by sugarmen
floats aching fingers

downstream 
                                       something terrible
                                   purpling her mouth
                                             tying lip to lip. 

My friend, this body,
stomach heavy with sugarwater, bloats—bursts—cracks open—
naʻau oilslicking through guts reaching—like hands, like hands!—for sugarman meat
aching fingers unstitch her jaw:

My friend, this body.
Mea lele iluna. 

She does not hedge apologies. She does not pick clean her teeth.
And the sugarmen
knees no longer trembling with young understanding
finally know what it is to be inside her.

Holler

The dog is ugly and unselfconscious. Wears her tumors real nice. Doesn’t mind them.

But then, she doesn’t have to watch herself limp around all lopsidedly geriatric. The saggy brick
of her body beneath their dinner table catching kicks and scraps, the chicken grease dried to her
muzzle in perfect, juicy fingerprints— if she’s ugly, well. That’s just not her problem. Not
yesterday, not tomorrow. Certainly not today, a Sunday. She knows Sunday by taste.

Her & her man take a shovel to the sidewalk cracks to hunt for weeds. It’s a red afternoon before
the turn of summer. He took her ear in the night. They talk about violence. Gnats clump together
like live-wire tumbleweeds, hanging—it’s all they can do to hold their bodies up—between
layers of wet-breath humidity. He asks, Have you been made easy yet? Are you anything good?

Any dog knows the answer to that one. Yes, yes I’m good, yes, I promise. She remembers the
shred of meat she might be thrown later. She remembers her ear. The sidewalk is boiling her feet
and making bubblegum of her man’s rubber shoe-bottoms. There are chew-marks bit into the
sides where, one day, burnt and jealous after a hot hike, she forgot to be afraid. Today she
remembers and says nothing. 

It doesn’t matter anyway. Goodness never saved anyone a warm sleep or a patch of soft dirt.
Shivering skin from body in a hard corner and doing nothing about it— easy-like, good-like.
Learn to eat a punch. Turn the other cheek. Shoddy sidewalk crack weeds punching through
concrete, no-one with a shovel, no-one violent enough to get it done. Goodness’ sake. An endless
B-roll of unfinished kindnesses. Half a favor split open like fruit. All of those loose ends, all of
them throbbing. All her evidence of being known bunched in both fists. Salivating at the chance
to be looked at in the eye. The fruit rots once cut. How desperate, she thinks, I’ll never be that. 

Beneath the silk of a curbside tree, he lets her drink water from his hands. Her man is good. To
their left, asphalt melted from the fire last summer. It will be summer again soon. Everyone
understands what this means—even you. 

Sunday: Bones ache back inside and one more job she didn’t finish. It doesn’t matter who did it
first. Whether or not she had her teeth in him before he had his hands on her. What are you, a
child? He started it! He started it!

Good must not be a verb, and if it is, she’s never seen it done. Some subtle nuance rattles out of
its clothes. The difference between good and not good: Sitting when you’re told to. The
difference between right and self-righteous: Whether the guy next to you agrees. The guy next to
her falls asleep on the couch with his belt undone. There are her pieces in his bedside. She is
good enough to never ask for them back. 

Here is the truth: God wants you to be good. 

He wants you to swallow the blood in your mouth and be grateful it isn’t yours. Even if he hit
you first. Did he hit you first? Doesn’t matter. You are in a car with a man but you cannot see his
face. Together you make the journey between action and consequence, and then back again. One
of you knows the end; the other has hands on the wheel. Your faith is your goodness, and you
have none. God wants you easy. Do you care?

She settles herself on the piece of floor between his legs. Bitch gone to lick her wounds and keep
her teeth where they belong. Her ear aches. She can smell the mold squatting in his gut. If I was
rotting, would you promise not to put your hands in me? What if I asked nicely? What if I
begged? 

It isn’t that she knows the answer. It’s that she doesn’t want to.

Sunday: Sneaking out the backdoor. Old and ugly and running. Cars scream something awful
past her and she gorges on highbeams until she is fat, incandescent. Light pours through the dark
twist of her body, all of it hers. Goodness dropped to grope at honesty. Nothing of God. No man
could think up a mouth like that. 

And what will she do with herself, now that she isn’t good? 

Oh, anything. Anything.

View of my mother's bedroom through the cracked open door.

I’ve always thought you were beautiful like this. Elegant. Perfumed air; a vanity mirror;
shards of a moment collected by bloody hands. 

Given one body to holdkeep 
           and doing it proudly.

You have never once dyed your hair. 
Humility, 
    the unbuilder, 
  cannot touch you.
You are unmoved, irreverent, silver-streaked.

I am standing here at the ʻōpū of your home in the piko of your doorway
in the pūʻao of your floorboards, 

your hand curls inwards and my spine follows–
a collapsed thing. Soft boned. 

I think the sun strikes differently in this room, 
(which I cannot enter)
think light softens its clenched fist,
I think it offers you graces the rest of us are spared,
I think you do not like me. 

Unsweetened, needful, grasping at the hems of your heavyskirts
standing with one eye peering out from the next room
silent as the grave that secondbore Christ,
fear hungry body consuming itself.

You are unmoved. 

The mother’s hand is always splintered from wood rot
you split open your own skull for mango pits,
pluck     and shove bitter fruitskins down my throat, 
I bear too much of my father’s face,
I must be a lonely, pitiful, simpering beast
I am begging for love and table scraps,
I am convinced they taste the same,
I am, I have, I want, I want, I want
ravenously.

I’ve told you I
love you mama
look at me. 

I wish I
looked like 
you instead
of him. 

Give me your hand, 
she says

but I vomit up a mango pit instead. 

I have loved you since you lived inside me. 

I made your bones.

Author’s Bio

Lehua Leong is a recent graduate of Hawaiʻinuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge from Makawao, Maui. Her several years as diaspora in Texas heavily influence her work and perspective. To Lehua, Makawao is the best place on earth because it is where her grandmothers’ bones are buried. She thinks that generosity and grief have something important to do with each other, but hasn’t quite figured it out yet. She writes in pursuit of this answer.

Photos by staff