— for Grandma

The old mahogany cuckoo clock chimes the hour.
Dawn.
The thin light filters in through thick curtains,
casting shadows on the walls.
I rock softly in Grandpa’s recliner,
my legs curled to my chest, my eyes closed.
Grandma is on the phone,
greeting her brother’s voice across
a million miles of wire – “moshi moshi…”
Her words, like puzzle pieces,
spread out wide before me.

She will not teach me Japanese:
Manzanar taught her the value of silence.

She has her back to me, facing the kitchen
as if her entire life were contained there –
a passive prisoner in a curtained cage.
When she hangs up, she will turn to me,
and pretend she’s surprised I am there,
though I am always sitting in the dim light,
listening.

She’ll smile at me, and her wrinkled face
will glow beneath a shock of
coal-black hair that still refuses to gray.
Her small black eyes will squint
beneath heavy eyelids,
and I will know that she is happy.

I can imagine her making California rolls
for lunch, because my brother begged her.
I’ll watch her cut the cold crab,
cucumber, avocado, seaweed,
and her hands, like spiders, will roll out rice.
Rice…
I can hear her walking in the kitchen,
still chattering in Japanese,
as her feet pad across linoleum floors –
feet an inch-thick with dry, hard calluses,
from working in rice paddies, to support her brothers,
when she should have been in medical school.

Suddenly, her history stretches out before me:
Manzanar and marriage,
her dead Daddy, her disappointment,
Hiroshima, children, that
placid, implacable smile –
all these pieces refuse to fit.
So I sit here in Grandpa’s chair,
and I let her voice wash over me.
The puzzle remains inscrutable.