Summer’s End
Alison Clara Tan
Do you alone recall folding through houses
like hands on a clock,
how your bones shrank into the space
between tatami and floor?
The wife wets her hands with daikon,
waits for the day you unlearn thank you.
Do you alone recall folding through houses
like hands on a clock,
how your bones shrank into the space
between tatami and floor?
The wife wets her hands with daikon,
waits for the day you unlearn thank you.
Memory wouldn’t work anymore:
too much war, or school, or new names
Taking up space where our laughter
used to hide-and-seek each other.
And the lighthouse? It remains
beside the ruins of the old house
And then we’re off to the races, and it’s been a long tour in America, year after year of learning to read between the lines of her well-sold dreams — shopping malls! Highways! Cop shows! Liberty and justice for all! — and yet, here suddenly in the eleventh hour some things are revealed anew — PIRANHA PLANT! MUSHROOM! BANANA PEEL! BOO!
When I tell you I cried, I mean
that solanums are the largest genus
in the family Solanacae, the nightshades,
flowering plants both beautiful and dangerous,
as we learn many things are—I am reminded, here,
of the scrawling of a long-gone child,
asking if what is dangerous is evil.
My cousin calls The Gold
Saucer the in-game casino,
and I think back to the backseat, en route
to Vegas, sandwiched between
her and her brother, my shoulders aching.
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