Brian Komei Dempster

Moving forward or back? Which way am I? I wake grasping your nightgown. I am still there. In the haze of faces burning. Arch of spreading flame, black-haired girl in saddle shoes and plaid skirt, knee-deep in a yard of violets. Her father, in clogs, pounding a path home, balancing buckets of carp on a bamboo pole. Daughter, father, splash of carp, magenta rows, white light's flashbulb zing fades as I cling to silk's edge, slats of ribs a bridge I take to your belly's bulge. My pollen inside you, nubs of arms and legs, hands with fingers petaling. Vase of roses on the night stand. Your gold ring engraved with my initials. The father, feet from the gate, his daughter kneeling with shears, pruning flowerbeds. Sealed in sheets, I draw close to your body, place my ear against flesh, listen to the rhythmic thumping inside water.

Through darkness they came, covered in ash, scarred by depths and distance, they bore salt and fire, breath steaming at edges of decks, hands clutching railings, their bodies dizzied by the lurching vessel, trunks pulled by hand,Where are you from? I unwrapped my legacy from cloth, the marble Buddha from my grandfather, ancient as the sea-stained covers of his sutras, the briny odor of carp centuries old.What are you? Not only where they were from but who they were and would become. His strange past and the mystery of my own face,American? this question flawed as we all appeared, my grandfather's birthplace the half of me I lightened, bleaching my black hair to reach my girlfriend Amber's blonde. In her candlelit room, I touched the mission photo of her rubbing ointment on the burns of a hibakusha. Where are water-filled troughs and the horses' manes my grandfather combed. The hay he bundled in twine,you from? Could he have smoothed names engraved in granite, the scars on the woman's skin, targets raised on maps? In a light blast What are a city of nips was erased,you? A blank scape,Go back no trace of his childhood farm in Hiroshima,to where I turned away from the chalkboard scrawled with Enola Gay,you are a button pushed, from a bomb dropped, at Amber's picnic they bowed over grace, and I looked up, didn't say Amen. Everything rises when the ground's skin is broken.

Church of broken toasters and singed fuses, church of the dripping roof and chipped chimney stack, of the flooded garage and its split door, gas-hissing pipes and sibilant water heaters, church of piss-poor light and shaky ladders where I unchoke windows and dislodge chopsticks from pipes, smooth curled up wallpaper and key the locks, fix clocks sticking or ticking with different times, church where wings of dead flies drift like petals from cobwebs, ghosts sift through floorboards and the homeless sleep in compost, steeping like tea bags pungent from the leaves' damp weight. Church where I am summoned by the door's clatter of brass to the brown-toothed vagrant who spreads open her overcoat; to the chattering man who communes with pines and brooms the stairs; to the bent, old Japanese woman who forgets her keys, waits for me to twist the lock free so she can scrub floors with Murphy wood soap and a toothbrush, wobble atop a ladder and polish the two-ton bell. On this path I am my uncle setting cubes of cheese into jaws of traps, and my grandmother stirring peas into a pan of fried rice, and my grandfather padding the halls in slippers and gloves, the cold globes of his breath a string of prayer beads weaving me, a mixed-blood grandson, into them.