were once gummy smiles

dancing on shorelines

when white fingers came crawling

pointing in the wrong direction

down throats

up skirts

then the guns and knives

and paints and brushes

the artist captures those already captured

dismembers bark-skinned bodies

reassembles them stretched white

on canvas

the south sea maiden immortalised

the young girl dead

✹

My first love. We were head over heels for each other.

It was the beginning of summer, and I’d come down with an awful cold. He stayed by my side the entire time, cooked me soup, collected all my snotty tissues, listened to me groan about my headaches, and watched stupid rom-coms with me. After a week, I finally felt well enough to go outside. Sunlight would do me good, and we hadn’t gone on a date in a while. We walked along the waterfront, and he took photos of me looking at birds I didn’t know the names of on his disposable camera. One of those ones with black-and-white film.

We reached Te Papa, and I realised in the couple months we’d been dating, he still hadn’t met any of my family. So I led him upstairs to the art gallery, and walked over to the big portrait, left of the centre.

“This is my ancestor, Poeatua. She was a princess, held hostage by Cook. This painting was done while she was on the ship, probably fucking terrified. It was the first portrait of a Pasifika woman to circulate Europe, and kinda started the whole Dusky Maiden trope.”

This was a big moment for me; he was meeting my grandmother’s grave.

He leaned back in his slightly oversized Lacostes, really took in the painting, and said,

“You know, your tits kinda look the same”.

I was 19.

So was she.

*title is a quote from James Cook’s diary