On an early spring night in Manhattan last year, the Texan-born comedian, poet, and actor Catherine Cohen attended a party where the Māori poet Tayi Tibble was in attendance, visiting all the way from New Zealand. After hearing Tayi read a piece from her book Poūkahangatus, Catherine suggested she come share her work at Club Cumming downtown, where Cat was hosting a weekly, eclectic “Cabernet Caberet.” Though they’d only just met, these two poets from opposite sides of the globe had been in dialogue on the page all along.
wtn boysTayi TibblePoukahangatus
wtn boys by Tayi Tibble
soft wellington boys in six hundred dollar leather want to send me their poetry & tie me to their beds so I tell them I like their fathers instead & listen to their aluminium skulls crack like coke cans and thunder.
road trip poem #17Catherine CohenGod I Feel Modern Tonight
road trip poem #17 by Catherine Cohen
I’m jealous of everyone and wouldn’t change a thing every time we have sex I tell you it’s one for the record books and you say something can’t be special if everything is. boys love drumming on stuff boys love taking their shirt off with one hand oh my god experience whatever pleasure you can in this life for example I’m at mcdonald’s right now
He ran his tongue over her bruised knees and she was immediately overwhelmed by the intimacy between skin and bone, by the feeling of his wet front teeth, by the wetness of her purple and yellow trauma swelling just beneath the surface. It was always there, an invisible pollution, but finally it had risen and—dear God—somebody wanted to kiss it. Sometimes her body was a swimming pool full of dead bees and foliage, and sometimes she liked that better. It kept the delicate boys away. When she was little and lived by the sea, she swam a lot and was fearless with her body. She let herself be thrashed and turned about by wave after wave, this way and that way. Her grandmother always said Never turn your back on the ocean, because you never knew what might be coming in. She used to think about sharks and stingrays, then tidal waves, then she thought about a horizon full of big white sails. Still, she always felt safe in the water, and she welcomed the invasion.
Born the year Disney released Pocahontas, Tayi Tibble, a Maori woman in the colonized state of New Zealand, has inherited a few stories she’d like to detonate. In her collection Poūkahangatus, arriving on our shores this week to mark her American debut, she pays tribute to her ancestors and remembers the community that raised her. Weaving warm lyrics and glass-cut prose poems, visions of love through pop-culture and indigeneity through the questions of capitalism, Tibble uses the force of her wit and her vulnerability to carve her own creation tale in these bold, fresh-voiced poems.
Identity Politcs
I buy a Mana Party T-shirt from AliExpress.
$9.99 free shipping via standard post. Estimated arrival 14–31 working days. Tracking unavailable via DHL. Asian size XXL. I wear it as a dress with thigh-high vinyl boots and fishnets. I post a picture to Instagram. Am I navigating correctly? Tell me, which stars were my ancestors looking at? And which ones burnt the black of searching irises and reflected something genuine back? I look to Rihanna and Kim Kardashian shimmering in Swarovski crystals. Make my eyes glow with seeing. I am inhaling long white clouds and I see rivers of milk running towards orange oceans of sunlit honey. Tell me, am I navigating correctly? I want to spend my money on something bourgie, like custom-made pounamu hoop earrings. I want to make them myself but my line doesn’t trace back to the beauties in the south making amulets with elegant fingers. I go back into blackness, I go back and fill in the gaps, searching through archives of advertisements: Welcome to the Wonderland of the South Pacific. Tiki bars, traffic-light cocktails & paper umbrellas. Tell me, am I navigating correctly? Steering through the storm drunk & wet-faced waking up to the taste of hangover, a dry mouth, a strange bed, shirt above my head is the flag fluttering over everything. What were we celebrating? The 6th of February is the anniversary of the greatest failed marriage this nation has ever seen. In America, couples have divorce parties. We always arrive fashionably late. Tell me, am I navigating correctly? The sea our ancestors traversed stretches out farther than the stars.
