An excerpt from
T H I R T E E N _ W A Y S _ O F _ L O O K I N G _ A T _ T H E _ B U S
By Gizelle Gajelonia • 2010 • $12
Design by Sumet (Ben) Viwatmanitsakul

from "He Do Da Kine In Voices":
(The Waste Land – T.S. Eliot)

  Real Unreal City
Under the gray vog of a winterless dawn,
A crowd flowed over Waikīkī Beach, so many,
I had always thought Hawaiʻi had fucked so many.
The mindless pimps, with their eyes fixed on the Other,
Walked up the strip and down King Kalākaua Street,
To where Dog The Bounty Hunter kept the city safe
With prayer, Beth’s breasts, and pepper spray.
There I saw one I knew
(my uncle’s friend’s brother’s calabash cousin),
And stopped her yelling: Eh, Aunty!
What time the number 4 bus coming?”

In Thirteen Ways of Looking at TheBus, Gizelle Gajelonia discovers her muse in Honolulu's TheBus mass transit system. She takes seriously (in this seriously funny chapbook) the notion of routes—routes through Hawaiʻi's history and geography, routes through American poetry, routes through languages spoken in Hawaiʻi.. Many of the pieces parody canonical poems by T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, and Eric Chock. Out of her parodies come marvelous revisions. Among the figures included in Gajelonia's revised canon are Hawaiʻi's last queen, Liliʻuokalani, Filipina nurses, and an honor's thesis writer very like the author who dreams of Columbia University.

Gizelle Gajelonia was born in the Philippines and raised in Wahiawā, Hawaiʻi. She is a 2004 graduate of Leilehua High School (go Mules!). She earned her BA in English with Highest Honors from the University of Hawaiʻi in 2009.

Read more about Gajelonia's work on the TinFish Editor's Blog.

Janna Plant has written a review of Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Bus at Tarpaulin Sky.