Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize Honorable Mention, selected by the New England Poetry Club Board
To My Many Mothers, Issei and Nisei
Praise be to beef liver stew, to gravy biscuits
and home-baked bread, to women
in work pants and suspenders who worked like dogs
in the packing shed, up to elbows
in rose clippings. You fed us well, O goddesses
of goulash and green beans, of Sunday dinners
wrangled from the coop. For penny money
and seamstressing, praise. For parsnips
and sweet potatoes, praise. Even for the years lost
to sharecropping and strawberries, hallelujah.
You worked until the final hour then rose
three days later, baby squalling on your hip,
back to breaking canes, clipping hooks,
hustling the men through lunch hour.
No breaks, boys. Hallelujah to Pond’s Cold Cream,
to curling rags and church bento socials.
Praise to the nursery truck revving in the morning,
the clank of steel pipes and boiler-
house rumble. All glory to the Berkeley streetcar
and Key Route electric train, the smokestacks
of Richmond and foggy peaks of San Francisco.
And because they’re what taught us to praise,
glory to the roses run wild, the packing shed
left to cobweb. Praise to the crowded horse stalls
and half-built barracks of Rohwer, Arkansas,
dusty sheets and muffled nights of Block 9-9-C,
100. Sakai, Chu. 102. Sakai, Ruby. 103. Sakai, Kazue.
O praise to the camp midwives, the Nisei girls
shooting hoops and swatting birdies when their mothers
weren’t looking. And to the college-bound coed
who crossed the country, camp release papers
in hand, hallelujah. Her truth marches on.
Isako Like Ash Your Sister Drifts Back to You
During the war Isako you tell me your sister her daughters half-Japanese turned the neighbors cold this memory Isako a thicket that cannot be breached how it rises to block the sky nights Isako you tell me you darkened the windows readied a pot of uncooked rice for the pit in your front yard deep as a grave Isako out of the wanderings of history you have emerged Isako on this white couch all the body fallen from your bones to hear you speak Isako of war rations potatoes one week yellow onions the next mother riddled with stomach pains is like hearing you speak of another life Isako stumbling through streets bolts of silk clutched to your chest begging for handfuls of rice Isako your uncle whispers something about the city bombed like ash your sister and her two girls drift back to you on the wind your brother soon follows overhead a haze of memory so many lifetimes Isako together we stand mist breaking into little tendrils and drifting away Isako the world so bright and buzzing with activity it is difficult Isako to remember you at the center an obliterated city explosions of light buildings immediately flattened above the thicket Isako smoke rises from another life Isako the wail of air raid sirens the life you lead Isako not so distant as you may think
Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Isako Isako, winner of the 2017 Alice James Award, the Nautilus Gold Award for Poetry, a National Indie Excellence Award, and a Maine Literary Award. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including The Yale Review, Calyx, Indiana Review, and Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience.