Standing at the front of a room delivering a karakia

for Apirana Taylor 

I’m so colonized I put zeds in the colonize / always look to the centre and find a reflection / reading a prayer off my phone coz I can’t hold my own language / my moment of tehei mauriora / my monument to shame / the keri bottles funding deathsquads for the USA / you heard me through the mist of ones and zeroes my stubborn guide through te pō / can we calculate a multiplicity inside a black hole / or / can I sing of the wind in a room that lets no breeze through / is this whare so different from yours / was your north the same as mine / the south the same as mine / as yours as mine is as ours / what tip comes back red except that which is slowing / killing me / dip inside my insides and see / a plastic plastic person / trying to deliver tikanga from a smartphone / uber eats auto-kaitangata / until nothing but my bones are left / shone white / innard-draped / on the carpet

Essa Ranapiri

essa may ranapiri (Ngāti Raukawa | they/them/theirs) if they die before the end of the settler colonial nation state of NZ you owe them a revolution [their first book of poetry ransack is out now from VUP]