Coda
minidoka manzanar kooskia harmony / sweet
rice balled into tiny fists / served on chipped porcelain
::
smuggled from one broken / home / to another /
fallow fields / relentless hillocks / sky unburdened
::
by mercy / her sister too young to / know the world
as more than / men & sunset & men & wound & a song
::
unchanged for six generations / imperfectly pure
is what i mean / raw / as much arms as voice / as much
::
silence as candle / flickering still / what she lost
in the camps she lost again today / a sickness
::
a mask & some good old boys sharpening
their tongues on her / ninety-four-year-old
::
chipped porcelain skin / balled up into tiny
fists / under her eyes a pair of long dark nights
::
dog howls / the same sweet sweet rice
& a new kind of forgetting / less trauma
::
this time / less younger sister squirming
silently in her own / ruined body / more
::
dementia maybe / or exhaustion / the last
time we visited her / before the pandemic
::
my children saw so much of her face / in theirs /
no self- / interrogation / no need for context / now
::
their board books alive in / swans & talking tigers & cherry
blossoms / are chipped / untranslatable / all empty sky & mercy