Poetry Suite by Ken Yoshikawa
“There is an order you must understand before you can make language dance.”
Poetry by Ken Yoshikawa
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A Ghost Tale of Two Cities
Nagai means ‘long’
like a flight from here to Tokyo,
like the oooooooooooooooooooohs of a ghost.
Nagaiki means ‘long life’.
Naga-ame means ‘long spell of rain’,
which to us may as well be home.
The ‘i’ (nagai) is the dictionary form of the unconjugated adjective.
Whew!
Hiroi means ‘wide’,
like a turtle shell;
like the audience of a well made film;
Hiroba means ‘plaza’.
Hirobakyoufushou means ‘agoraphobia’.
It’s a wild world indeed.
Dear, Hollywood, I wonder if you know this.
I wonder, what with cowboys drawing colts,
knights slaying no-goods, spies harboring secrets,
or pirates spilling pearls,
when they’re rolling across the floor –
I seem to think you do.
So, if nagasode means ‘long-sleeve’ then hirosode means...?
I think you’re catching on:
a place to keep your aces.
So you know Nagasaki means ‘long cape’
like a bitty peninsula. Right?
And Hiroshima means ‘wide island’,
it speaks much for itself.
There is an order you must understand before you can make language dance.
But that doesn’t have to matter, right?
We can say Nagasaki means ‘long ago’, means ‘half-life’, means ‘forgotten’, means ‘rad’ means
‘long point’ means ‘stick and roast it’.
I mean I think you know what it means to stretch anything until the meaning changes.
Hiroshima really means ‘follow the light’ means ‘pretty skies’ means ‘mushroom spaghetti all
over your pants’ means ‘relieve your shadow of its body’,
but that’s just between you and me, in this space.
It’s a wild world, because there’s order,
because more than words actually tear when they are pulled the wrong way.
When you give a child a hero, and then you take it away and then you change it.
Worlds break in ways that make not a single sound.
You seem to put Scars where they don’t much belong.
It’s OK. We can carry the weight, but the joke is still on you.
Nagasaki means ‘magic man’,
but Hiroshima still means ‘a broken heart’
so do your magic, then.
Take a mold of our face
and throw it away.
Take a scalpel,
strap it to a white curse
I mean a white cursor –
Whip it in a bending confuser bro cam –
I mean a rendering computer program –
Photoshop your way through the mouse maze
getting lost for cheese in the complex
of raze down, erase & spray paint.
Color my house white, please.
Color my house white, please.
Pick the locks with CG.
Fix the bones in our face, please.
Wait let us try.
Hiroshima means
wide eyes and a pika pika houdai
a “waaaaaaa are, sore, kawaiina, kakoiida”.
Nagasaki no longer means
long eyes,
but
long nose.
Hiroshima: not
wide nose,
but
wide eyes.
Let me introduce you
to the beautiful ghosts
of two deleted cities:
Nagashima
&
Hirosaki.
Where haunted of defeat by military superiority,
that the white victors
are not just stronger
than us
more wealthy
and intelligent
more beautiful
than us,
they’re actually just better
than us.
The best way to reinforce supremacy
is to have our enemies defeat themselves
and forget why they’re doing it.
So, Scarlett Johansson,
you are exactly the Japanese woman
Japan has been waiting to become.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
It has been too long. The work, too long.
We can actually be you now.
But,
you
can’t
speak
the language.
Easy fix.
They will take your fancy images, remove your voice, make you silent, and then put Japanese
words, Japanese souls, Japanese ghosts back into the shell they built to get over our
annihilated lessons in humility.
But what about me?
Am I the now unaccepted byproduct
of a loser’s complex in a global world,
with wide eyes & long nose,
Japanese words and US passport?
Nagasaki could mean ‘long precedent’
but, hey, I can stretch anything to change its meaning.
Nagasaki means ‘long game’.
Means we’re coming back for what is ours.
Means you are running out of excuses Hollywood.
Hiroshima means the bombshell bombed this one,
Means cheap thrills have high costs,
Means sex sells - tried to sell –
Means you couldn’t sell our childhood dreams back to us
because you can’t take for keeps that which was never yours.
I mean, you just seem to break what you do not understand.
The magic man in dabble land will wreck himself the most.
Remember now?
I am become death, the destroyer of worlds?
Not I. No Hollywood, I thought you understood.
I am the Little Boy, coming home,
split, hungry for a hard boiled egg in the fallout.
You are the ghost
in the shell of a very Fat Man,
falling
falling
falling.
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To My Father’s Neckties
1. 結び方 (Musubikata):
the way to tie a father to his son.
These roadways of inheritance,
these
dusty pulse keepers
nobly slept
in a mahogany cabinet
at my grandparents’ home.
They are London,
Melbourne,
Milan, and Grand Rapids.
They are Paris and Nagoya,
Amsterdam and home.
Multichromatic elephants
and polka dots.
Take 20,
30,
he said,
with gently
demanding generosity.
Maybe, each time
I tie one
for an interview
or
for a wedding,
I’ll learn
to tie the clouds
together:
dress fancy the Pacific,
connect
his mirror
to my mirror.
2. かっこいい (Kakkoii):
Wrap it twice
around the knot,
so you remember.
Keep the front
just long enough,
so you remember.
Master that dimple,
just below the knot,
so you remember.
Yes.
No.
Wait.
Here.
Just like that.
Hai. Iiyo
3. 正しい (Tadashii):
I stuffed
probably
18 ties
into a plastic bag.
Now,
what the hell
am I gonna do
with 18 ties?
Can they tie the years I didn’t see him
to the moment
I looked him in the eyes
to thank him?
He gave me shoes,
a badass coat,
bought me a navy blue suit.
When he saw
the condition which I’d subjected the ties to,
I realized
I didn’t really want the ties,
but rather
the instruction
for how to take care of them.
Please, Dad,
show me a way
to not stuff my life
into a plastic bag.
Show me
how to dress so sharp
it cuts a wormhole to the sun.
Is this the right way?
Are these ties
your wormhole
to me?
4. 何をしましょう? (Nani wo shimashyou?)
He told me,
there has to be distance
between two people
for there to be
a conversation.
That if you ask someone
directly
what they want
in Japanese,
it ends up being
rude and invasive.
I’m so used
to being the other end
of your tie
that now that we’re
together,
looking through the very same mirror
I’m living
on the black stripes
printed
on your thin end,
just that much closer,
just for today.
I contradict
every time I ground your memory
like a fingernail.
I will never be you, Dad.
But,
I’m fixing my collar, Dad.
I remember everything,
otousan.
Look,
I did it.
Look,
I did it.
Dad, I am just like you.
5. 完璧 (Kanpeki):
I’ve decided,
when I leave,
I’ll tie each one
to the wings
of the airplane,
and watch them flutter
from the window seat.
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Give Fate the Ferry
I like to lick my plate, pick all the grains
like souls all lost and needing saving here
inside my belly. Go, give fate the ferry,
face first and merry. Slake thirst. Savor same
as sabertooth untamed and dirty maned.
Beware, leftovers, here I raid you down
beyond the morsel to the clay beneath.
Who needs a damn dishwasher when there’s me?
So is it poorest table manners or
attentive gratitude for little things
that gets me gobbling like an animal?
My grandmother at ocean’s farthest reach
told me, 米一個残さず
(kome ikko nokosazu / zembu otabenasai)
全部お食べなさい。Please eat,
not leaving, but a single grain of rice.
Her whispers told of paddy farmers’ toil,
those who picked, piece by piece, each precious grain
and cleaned them, portioned, packed them, hauled and drove
with sweaty brows, big smiles, and bigger hearts.
The world incorporated’s come to steel:
the gentle industry of hands is now
all mechanized with volts and switches. Gone
may be the days, but not the memory.
She ran as fire rained around her, prayed
inside her six year heart to not be prey
to death and char. O how her neck hairs know
that doom sure likes to whistle like a faceless
cowboy: shotgun-shouldered, shameless, showering
its payback payload packed all full of fear.
Yes, innocence so burns like sliding doors
and wafts up smoke upon an engine’s roar.
We have a phrase: 鬼に金棒。(Oni ni kanabou)
The Ogre first, and then his iron club.
B-29s are terrifying, but
the iron club was hunger, malnutrition.
I like to think we were her hunger pains,
that grueling urge to grit and persevere:
please keep a hold, Obachan 頑張れ ,
(Ganbare / ikitekudasai!)
生きてください! Please live, and eat
what all you can, not wasting but a single
grain of rice. I swear that I’ll believe
you wrapped your centimeters there inside
a wooden box and to a turtle’s trust
bequeathed it to the bottom of the sea,
to be invested in an ancient shrine;
your height was safely hidden in the waves.
Yet come when we your family took shape
the turtle thus returned the tide to us.
Today her head can’t pass my chin at all,
but cousin Kousuke stands o’er six feet tall.
With curly salt and pepper hair, and keen
ol’ eyes and O that laugh and smile, she calls
for dinner time. Gohandesuyo!
See what a triumph every meal is.
Not like a buzzard with a muzzle feed.
Not like a tollbooth for a canteen bridge.
I like to lick my plate and celebrate:
each bit a disco light inside my mouth
each bowl a treasure trove of ancestry.
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Header image courtesy of Mojo Wang. To view his artist feature, go here.
Ken Yoshikawa is a shin-issei (new-wave first-gen) half-Japanese actor and spoken word poet from Portland, OR. He graduated from Reed College with a B.A. in Theatre Arts. He is so grateful for his family and his friends for their love and support. He also has work published in Hapa Mag and floatOn's Letters from the Void. You can find him on IG at @yoshakeawaken and @backflip.jupiter
Photo courtesy of Vi Son Trinh
