Published Spring 2007
 
The Lesson from the Boy's Mother
Japanese men are chauvinist,
she declares in that time of night
when secrets turn bitter like ghosts.
My mother pours hot green tea.
Hot like her spite is, a generation's worth,
I say, filled with bile.
You wouldn't understand. You hadn't been there.
A casaba belly at eight months,
she returned from Hong Kong having spent
what was left of the wedding money for bone china:
plates, serving bowls packed in butcher paper,
placed in thick cardboard tied with twine.
They were water jugs, one box for each hand,
without the bamboo pole to balance them.
At Tokyo International, she carried them like a coolie,
out of the taxi, up the escalator.
Japanese men stood suited like proper gentlemen.
One stared as he held court at the bar,
a dragon's wreath swirled
from the cigarette dangling in his lip.
Not one man in that airport bothered
to help me, she says.
When my mother sets her cup down,
it makes a sound heavy as stone.
|
