As I Am

Born a child of two Oceans:
Navigators and Storytellers molded from
Brown skin, brown eyes, thick hair, and
Thicker thighs.

Confined to an inbetweeness;
Bleeding soil, stolen and scarred:
The space that separates my Mother’s ocean
from my father’s ocean.

This place between places me between
maps, twisted into roots
marking freedom and
mats woven with the history of a family’s name.

Rooted in two colonial triangles—
One stolen from their land,
Shaved heads, clipped tongues, bound hands
Forced to forget their sands while building a
new country in the home of truer people.

One with their land stolen;
Indigenous ways stuffed into a tuna can,
loaded into a star-spangled banger,
Fired at a fale until it resembled a church.

The vastness of our identity contained by
invisible lines, conditions to believe lies
that tell us the only way to liberation is
through leather-laced masculinity or down
the barrel of imperialism.

The vastness of our identify stripped of its
name, hair, language, stolen and strapped to
the bottom of a ship, hoping to be
swallowed away by the foam of the sea.

My fathers ancestors found freedom in the
same place my mothers ancestors called
Sacred Space.

When I visit the ocean,
I can hear their cries for peace, their chants for the future.
And I know that
There is salt in my blood.