Poetry

I am Japanese, but I have never been to Japan

And neither has my father

And my Grandma has only visited

1. To be married off

When she told her to-be husband that she wanted to go to college,

And was denied marriage for being too loud

2. To explore with a friend, maybe a sister

I don’t remember. And I’m on a plane back to college and so I can’t call her to ask.

Even with Little Tokyos and J-towns,

Davis is the closest I get to Japan. 

It’s where my Grandma is,

It’s where my Grandpa is buried.

My Grandma’s house has those paper doors

And those doorway curtains

And a Go board

And Grandma’s stories.

And when she could still cook, Grandma’s food.

Most of which was brown and mushy

I used to say, like army food

My Grandma was

Interned

Ages five to nine.

She graduated high school early,

And went to college at sixteen.

Became a nurse

Midlife,

Became an immigration lawyer.

75% win rate.

She has two sons,

And two grandchildren,

And to me, she is Japan.
On this plane, I miss Japan.

1. Kaeru; to return (written while leaving)
2.  I could not look up the name because I was on a plane; “paper doors” are shoji
3.  “Doorway curtains” are noren

i will stay.

as young elephants follow their herd til death, through bitter sand and acrid ground. they know nothing but this. i will stay

as the thousand year old pine deepens its roots into the very core of the Earth, bounding, stretching, winding. it is but here. i will stay.

i will stay as the boulders in the forest that have sat unmoving for years. covered by moss older than my body, eroded by snowfall older than my soul. i will stay as the river that has lasted all droughts and survived every freezing. it has changed, yes, but it has stayed. i will stay

as the city of Greece. its ruination never caused it to stray. it is not weak for crumbling, no, but mighty for standing as long as it did.

i will stay as Yanartas, the fire that has been kept burning by generation after generation after generation after. i will stay as the ash that seeps from it into the ground, only to be hardened into igneous rock, then metamorphic, then sedimentary then. i will stay, i promise

just as the lovers in pompeii found bones tangled around each 

other. faces long gone from the cascade of soot, but do faces really matter anyways? i will stay like the light from dying stars

blazes for all to see. long ago gone, but still flickering here whether anyone cares or not. nonetheless. i will stay.

there is a piece of me

that belongs to the south,

in virginia.

wherein my heart is chocked full of

warm cinnamon apples

and biscuits and gravy,

for breakfast,

cornbread at dinner,

peppermint puffs in-between meals,

a constant in this house 

heated by a wood fire stove,

skirted with a wrap-around porch,

home to food bowls

for stray cats. 

i want rolling land,

fruit trees,

farm animals,

the feeling that 

Glen Campell’s Southern Nights

was written for me.

but there is no me in

churches every few miles,

shopping centers miles away.

  no me in military academies,

             in mud-covered pickup trucks,

          in MISSION BBQs.

i want the south,

but it does not want me, 

as me.