Grandmother
I imagine the delicate pucker of her mouth
gaping like a wound. Her sokuhatsu updo,
an oily black tangle on a dusty pillow.
On May 24, 1945, eighteen years before
I was born, Suyeme Kimura died at Tule Lake.
Block 53, Barrack 5, Room C, maybe D,
on an army-issued cot. In rooms opening
to the rafters on either side, clear conversations
of other imprisoned families. Wind blowing dust
through gaps between shrinking floorboards.
With my grandfather, her eight children,
she was forced from her Inglewood farm
into the camps: first Santa Anita, then Jerome
in Arkansas, then back to California.
Our grandma had bad motion sickness,
my cousin Jay tells me. The camp newspaper
Newell Star misspelled her name, left out
the y, but got her age right: forty-nine.
Elegy for Minnie Negoro
After a photograph by Tom Parker, 1943
Look at those hands,
poised like a dancer’s.
Without fan or parasol
they move in unison.
One inside, one out
of a wet clay vessel
centered and spinning
on a potter’s wheel.
Twenty-two, a student
at UCLA when Japan
attacked Pearl Harbor.
Forced to report
to Tanforan Racetrack,
transferred by train
to Heart Mountain,
a U.S. concentration camp
for natural born citizens
who look like her.
In a striped work shirt,
she learns to throw clay.
Where will that bowl go?
To Rohwer? That cup
to Minidoka? Are those
white plates for Tule Lake
where my father and family
eat in a mess hall?
Up and down,
her fingertips form
something of her own
making—a life of art,
a skill to pass on
under her patient gaze.
Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is a writer, visual artist, and teacher. He is the author of two poetry books: the full-length collection Common Grace (Beacon Press, 2022) and Ubasute, winner of the 2020 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition. He is also the author and illustrator of the nonfiction book Text, Don’t Call: An Illustrated Guide to the Introverted Life (TarcherPerigee, 2017). His honors include a MacDowell Stanford Calderwood Fellowship, a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry, a Connecticut Office of the Arts Artist Fellowship Award, and a St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award in Literature. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals and anthologies, including Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO, The Cincinnati Review, Consequence, Shenandoah, Gordon Square Review, Cave Wall, and elsewhere. Caycedo-Kimura earned his MFA from Boston University and teaches creative writing at Trinity College.