Your birth was the first time you left.
Creator, destroyer, we pretend she is not one god.
Every mother is a killer, every daughter is too.
Her body cocked and you, gentle bullet, flew.
My grandmother, spore of a mushroom cloud,
took her first breath in smoke.
The men told us the atom could never be split—
What did they know of divide?
I asked what it was like once,
girlhood and war.
My mother translated between us
And answered plain:
There were no sweets.
Finally pregnant, my grandmother
held her only child like water in her hands,
and brought my vessel into the world gasping,
and wailing her first word, more.
More was across the Atlantic,
double deep-fried,
billowing over subway grates.
More had light eyes, a tall nose,
rolled his r’s.
So, on the same day as my grandmother,
66 years later,
I, too, was born,
shrieking, incoherent,
brandishing a name she could not pronounce.
They carried me home in steady arms
And on the window there landed a paper
crane
Which promised all my wishes would come
true.
Indeed I was a good American, a perfect
stranger.
I grew up with cavities, selfies, 808 drums,
boredom.
My mother, only God I have known,
Beheld a creature she could no longer
translate,
and for the first time, there was no room for
more.
Why she never taught us Japanese
I couldn’t understand.
I took classes as a teenager to compensate—
I can admit now it never stuck.
But I remember the first kanji we learned,
the teacher at the board,
And my eager pen to blank paper;
She dictated,
This is mother: 母.
Two figures in a room,
reaching,
and the final stroke—
One slash between them.
