J. Wiremu Kane

ia

I am a creature of mud and salt.

I’ve spent too much time denying my true nature, wishing I were a sheltered cove of tropical turquoise. A bank-less stream carving a shifting channel in the white sand, individual grains cartwheeling where they meet lapping wavelets.

There is nothing about me that is gentle. That is shaded by the blue of gnarled pōhutukawa that hang off white cliffs, creased and folded into layers studded with airy balls of pumice.

I am the angry waves where the incoming tide meets the outgoing current of a harbour carved by taniwha. No longer fresh, but not yet seawater. Somewhere at that liminal space with the osmolarity or osmolality of blood. I used to know the difference, once. When sodium ions and potassium ions fighting against gradients seemed important.

Were important.

I am a thick-bodied tuna. The eel tuna, not the sandwich filling chew-na. I have a layer of insulating fat I refuse to feel ashamed of. Protection against the long white cloud of winter. A name that came with a warning. Pack warmly, we’re not in the tropics anymore.

I am the tannin-stained sand that makes clean, brackish water look brown. I remember thick roots and fossilised gum and millennia of decay and nutrients. Soil dark and rich as coffee grounds, full to bursting, swelling slender birches gouged with argentum to the thickness of oaks. Rain-washed by skyscrapers of cumulonimbus clouds that make the sky look both vast and small.

I am the sand bar clutching at ships of stolen wealth. A hundred-years ago now, but I haven’t forgotten and I won’t forgive. I shift and circle and fill deep channels that were there yesterday.

I am the contours of grassy hills, falling in terraces you thought were natural and god-gifted. You forget you’re squatting on the post-Ragnarök remains of the smallpox naïve.

I am the guttural shriek of the red-billed gull, meaningless mews, neck snakelike. The bullying jabs at the side shuffling black-backs. The gaps in sound beyond your hearing.

I am the cloud of sandflies you walk through, the taste of grit and protein and formic acid.

I am ugly when the tide is out. When my sulfurous scent bubbles up out of crab holes. The itching sting at your ankles. The too heavy rain drops that splatter your glasses and dribble down your neck.

I am the thick, glossy, salt-resistant outer layer of dropped mangrove seeds. The untidy bundles of kelp and broken shells abuzz with mites and stray blobs of jellies. I ruin your flawless curve of white-gold sand. I snatch at the loose joints of your jandals and wrinkle your nose with trimethylamine.

I am not a mysterious flute player in fog laden mountains. Chlorophyll veins filling and stretching under transparent skin, reddish hair like a swirl of shepherd’s warning clouds. I am neither thin, nor willowy.

I am a creature of mud and salt.

A taniwha whose bellow is the smash of the roaring forties on the exposed tip of this Atlantis.

My breath stinks of ketones and fish.

And I blow it in your face.

First published in Mayhem Journal Issue 9 December 2021 (The Never Press Project)
Guest Edited by Stephanie Christie & Mark Prisco

J. Wiremu Kane Ngāpuhi (Ngāti Toro, Ngāti Manu, Te Mahurehure) he/him/ia, lives and writes on the unceded ancestral lands of Ngāti Hei. He was the 2022 Emerging Māori Writer in Residence at the IIML and winner of the 2022 Surrey Hotel Residency. He has been widely published including in Landfall NZ, The NZ Listener, Middle Distance, and Annual 3. Through his writing he hopes to make colonists regret forcing him to learn English.