Green Linden Press

Heart, as Black Phoebe

Stream-side the meadow’s edge,
an open mouth
loops a script above the grass
tips.

A cursive most legible
dusktimes, or
when wet earth warms
to burst of hatch-
flitter.

An old god will say
bright pure radiant.

Hood of soot, the heart will say

persist persist.

Love is a dark calligraphy
brushed upon the sky.

Lehua M. Taitano is a queer CHamoru writer and interdisciplinary artist from Yigu, Guåhan (familian Kuetu yan Kabesa) and co-founder of Art 25: Art in the Twenty-fifth Century, a dynamic collective which investigates how Indigenous and Black art lives in the 21st century and envisions how it will flourish in the 25th century and beyond. She is the author of two volumes of poetry—Inside Me an Island and A Bell Made of Stones. Taitano’s work investigates modern indigeneity, decolonization, and cultural identity in the context of diaspora.