you can’t complain about bird noise in the city

the word gauze comes from gazzatum silk comes
from gaza / who is still dressing everybody elses wounds

cleaning out the cuts of cities flung farther than /
petrol can slick the founding fathers 

hair back / but just as long as an olive branch /
tended to by the same blood / since the past started, 

can oil us / make us a throng again / cashel street 
thick / with chanting like we forgot we / 

were a all village once too and / we always gave 
the megaphone / to the kids first and /

in my own language i look up the words for bond 
starve trauma / in my own language i am always looking up /

now / everything is relative to palestine /
at the traffic light a / woman unwraps a browned apple

slice / from a napkin and puts it in a man’s / mouth 
and the wall says free / gaza like

from the river to the dead sea / and the dead
i / want to put us all in the recovery position / i 

hope the bridge of remembrance /
remembers us back. 

Isla Reeves Martin

Isla Huia (Te Āti Haunui a-Pāpārangi, Uenuku) is a te reo Māori teacher and kaituhi from Ōtautahi. Her debut collection of poetry, Talia, was released in May 2023 by Dead Bird Books, and was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards 2024. Her work was also featured in the International Institute of Modern Letters’ Ōrongohau Best New Zealand Poems in both 2023 and 2024, and has been published in journals and anthologies throughout Aotearoa as well.