You are waterborne, embodied: heavenly mist.
A water sign, you ache to land, trade sweat for soil.

The water is a sign. Your hands, they whet and coil,
mend the seam that’s torn. It is akin to breathing.

Tend to your kūpuna; it is your kin, breathing.
Sense them in the syntax, in the delicate lilt.

Sense them in the needle, every stitch of the quilt,
they are constellations, limb and liminal, split.

And they are constellated in the swim of it—
siltkick to reefglitter, sharktooth to oceancling.

Ancestral shimmering like silt like silk like sea:
the myth becomes your body; heaven, thirsty.

Noelani Piters is a writer living in San Francisco. A recipient of fellowships from Indigenous Nations Poets, VONA, and PEN America, she was a finalist for the 2025 James Welch Prize. Her work can be found in or is forthcoming from Zyzzyva, Poetry Northwest, The Hopkins Review, Poetry, and elsewhere.

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