☐
☐☐
br
a n
d o
n ☐
☐
shi moda ☐☐☐
☐☐☐☐☐
☐☐☐☐☐
of
i
e
☐☐☐☐☐
☐☐☐☐☐
☐☐☐☐☐
☐☐☐☐☐
We were eating fries from Wendy’s
at an Arby’s in New Jersey
when my father’s wife told us
that when her mother was young
her father was beheaded
by the Japanese imperial army
She watched the Japanese cut their heads off
she said
What she saw
went inside her grew inside her
one of several
voices
in her head
the oldest the one
who knew everything saw everything
and kept it
to herself
except when weakness permitted
She had seen it
She was not a witness
that
enforces
an escalating distance
like looking through a glass box
or a fence
or down
at the heads of people
To witness To have witnessed
would have been
to not have had a head
or to be unfamiliar
with the lament
of carrying the head off
because it rained
and the heads were raining too
She said it like their home was replaced
with the afterimage
of everyone’s arrested face
and the faces of the Japanese men
as they turned
her caretakers and protectors
playmates and storytellers
into ghosts
carrying the lantern
they lit together
shaky, it rustled
grew heavier shadows
on the long, mottled stalks
growing out of her heart
to the flowers that hardened
on the end
She was spared
or escaped
and her baby brother too
took him and the rice
and ran through mud
they were running in their sleep
through mud up their ribs
but like winter
everything was pushed down
through the roots
She saved grains of rice, my father’s wife said
When she dropped a grain in the mud, even a single grain
she stopped
and picked up the grain every grain
rescued them saved them
to survive
into another sphere
to retrieve what proved to be missing
The mud fortified the rice, she said
to her daughter lifetimes later
thick
with hands
heavy
with footprints
people scattering
into the rupture
bearing the soul
of hunger
that would not end
when the bodies fell
still cradling the rice still ruling the future
that turned each family member
into a torch
or a mailbox
They hid in a cave, she said
The cave was still in her, grew
a shell filled with water
around her
Day became an interpretation of the dream of running
away from their dead
each day each night
each hour, each step
detached and dispensed demagnetized
the soul
so the self could keep running
you would think lighter and lighter
you would think the selves would fall off
but the soul is what absorbed
the sight of the bodies
We listened while eating fries
two, three fries at a time
like the gates were coming down
people advancing up
the greasy floor
kids in a crevice somewhere
salting earth
My father was looking at me
like the atrocity was playing on my face
which made my face real for a moment
sliding
like a shadow
down the soldiers’
How does a boy find himself
in an occupation force
Does a boy? lose himself
by law
I was old enough to be their older brother
to have gone through the process
of becoming a chest
with drawers, every drawer empty
gotten dirty and loose
my father might look like those men
if he was my younger brother
the soldiers’ age and aged with them
into the re-hallucination of Japanese faces
The first time my father’s wife’s mother
saw my father’s mother
she screamed
a black hole in the center of the room
whirled
the winds
of generations around
the space between her and my grandmother
she could see the bodies
more clearly
in the current
and my grandmother’s face
summoned by the gravity of each body
pulled the river
into her
she saw a ghost not a soldier
the soldier’s mother staring back
and had to be carried out of the room
Her body became the doorway it could not hold her
without disclosing the radiation it kept hidden
to keep the generations moving
past the countenance of traumas
Devil! she screamed
My grandmother did not understand
she was the terror
she must have seen her elders
in the faces of the young men
strung up like clothes
My grandmother, Japanese, had the luxury
of not being terrorized
by the woman’s ghost
or the ghost of the family members
she could eat and stare, process the role
her murderous present
was holding onto
The young girl became
an entire lightning
distilled
into the strength of an old woman
with eyes on the back of her head
the faces of loved ones slipping
into the sociopathy
of the twenty-first century
where her daughter brings home a Japanese boyfriend
his face still on his head, smiling
a complete lack of history
holding hands with an overflowing
absence of history
It was justified, my father said
about the atomic bombings
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
both bombs linked
by the dream of living forever
away from being tortured
by reality
The sky fell
a wave
growing inland
harvesting the histories the division of energy
of many thousands of people
It was justified, he said
three, four fries at a time
with the attitude of a woman
on her deathbed
resigned, free of nostalgia
many lifetimes of children
carrying on
Was he speaking as an American
a Japanese American
a Japanese American man
one face rotated
to catch the sun in its facets
light reflecting in heterogeneous ways
the psyche running backwards
into the familiar estrangement of a white American
deal
at the crossroads
I stared past my father
at the restroom door
counted the seconds until it opened
Someone going in
Someone coming out
I imagined myself
in the restroom
turning the water on in the sink
Looking in the mirror and seeing
men walking in and out
of the turquoise sky
pink iridescent green stalks of brown smoke
reorganizing deaths
into denominations
of democracy