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
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