Chamorros are the indigenous peoples of the Marianas Islands, a crescent shaped archipelago in the Northwest Pacific Ocean. Chamorro poetry has a winding genealogy, reaching back to the ancestral oral tradition of tsamorita and forward to spoken word and hip-hop. This essay suggests an additional genealogical thread: a relation between ancestral Chamorro visual aesthetics and contemporary Chamorro textual poetry. One of the most innovative forms of ancestral Chamorro visual aesthetics is canoe design. When Europeans first encountered Chamorro canoes in the 16th century, the canoes became known as “flying proas” because of how fast and nimble the canoes travelled. The canoe’s narrow hull is asymmetrical: flat on one side and curved on the other. The outrigger is mounted off the curved side and faces…