Years After I Quit the Water

Poetry
Written By Noelani Piters

The outrigger, a hull of blue
and black fiberglass seating two,
still hangs in my garage from red
rope. Often, a boy and I tread
—trod—murky water. One of few

lingering mysteries I knew
I would never know: a boy who
drank rivers; a boy who could wed
the outrigger’s

buoy to boat; who could make do
with words only for the canoe.
Floating in silence, the seabed
holding his gaze, I cursed the thread
that bound us, the body he wooed—
the outrigger.

Noelani Piters

Noelani Piters is a writer living in San Francisco, on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples. She was a 2024 Disquiet Literary Prize Poetry Finalist and a 2023 Moloka‘i Arts Center Artist in Residence. She has received support from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Juniper Summer Writing Institute, and Kearny Street Workshop. Her work has been published in swamp pink, Reed Magazine, and Pleiades, and she has contributed to The Rumpus and SOMA Magazine.

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