Ikaikaonalani James

i love a lesbian

i love a lesbian
who holds himself in laughter;
whose hair tells their story
of resistance & survival;
of home(is)lands & an ocean’s embrace;
of sore hands & feet, & transcending borders—
hair that listens to no man’s narrative
of nature—sprouting, waving, curling, coiling, reaching
out into the expanse. my reverence goes
to a lesbian whose eyes, lips, nose, skin
tell of tapestry & healing,
through days & nights of fatigue & sickness,
mixing mischief into salve, salvation
in these shades of brown.
i aloha a sapphic māhū
whose iʻi shakes the air warm,
whose leo cools lava into rock,
who knows how to huli the pōhaku.
& i know this love isn’t unfamiliar.
but a net sprawling across space, time, earth, water, air & bones,
& our knot—they said—was hand-picked
by Haumea, in ʻo ia expanse;
from the dark, generative slimy depths of pō,
to the dawn of the messy lives before us,
i love a lesbian