I write about familial connections across time and space, queer joy, and the very smallest creatures beneath our feet. At the centre of it all is my home: Vancouver.
fulsome shapes of fall
A path of bulbous blooms along the Renfrew sidewalk
parasols of salamander skins
sticky candy apples
Amanita Muscaria
gifts us ruby button jewels and gradients of salmon belly.
Cobblestone of pearls
remnant of the placental shroud;
paper-fine lamellae sharp like the pages of a new book.
Wearing her finest regal annulus,
she umbrellas upwards
toward grey Vancouver skies in exultation.
“So, where are you from?”
Inevitably, someone will ask you how you came to be in this time and place
how you arrived to call this inhospitable city of construction
home.
I give different answers for different faces:
for white men unaware of their hungry eyes, a flat, “Ontario,” and no more
(your enthusiasm is a hunger and I don’t care to be consumed anymore).
for people with accents,
high cheekbones, or dark, hopeful eyes looking for family away from home
I'm kinder. “Japanese Canadian,”
clear, firm
and softer these days about who I am.
But say, in the unimaginable future,
we meet in the quiet corner of a dim and ambient room, a din of conversation around us,
or make eye contact on a lulling, long bus ride, and there’s an opening, like, you drop your extra mask
say there’s a future where we aren’t as afraid of each other as we are now and you ask me who I am
Here’s what I’d tell you:
jan/ken/pon
These ghosts, like a fog, will rise.
stop/go
windshield wipers in rhythm with the radio
Clark, under the V
EAST
N cross, is a bokeh aberration. Red light.
rock/ paper/scissors/ water/
False Creek used to flow to Clark Drive until we paved it.
Water beats concrete, eventually.
There is a mist seeping into a concrete room of
family secrets, looking for ______
I'm not even sure. But
concrete has it's cracks and mist will persist, will
drip on your cheeks until sweat, sadness, and salt
solidify into half-told stories,
folded into the discomfort of
scraped black pan grease. all burnt and mixed together
with this rage that's all mine, but only half-claimed.
These ghosts like a fog will rise,
with a tremor and yearning I can't quite explain
will bring heat to my cheeks in conversation with a friend, as
we realize our great-grandparents knew each other
in another language, another revolution of the sun.
This is the electricity of connection.
We circle and echo, twist around each other,
like the very spirals of our smallest parts.
These ghosts, like a fog, will rise,
will gift you with knowledge so innate
it's fiction of a memory that means more than the truth.
Water flows
jan/ken/pon/
green light/
go.
Strand
1st Runner-up to the 2023 Subterrain Magazine Lush Triumphant Poetry Prize
like
hinted existence of ephemeral spider
glinting in sunlight;
choreography of birds;
toddler to mother, like yo-yo;
like gaze
all the eyes I was taught to demur
wanted or not
pinning me in place;
like valley winds
intermingling between our mouths
tying something in my being
to something in your being;
my hair that I pull from your collar;
my hair that you complain about, but
would cherish if I went;
You asked me why I want to stay
I am tied to this earth by a web
a million anchored hairs, some lost, some
tied with the hands of my
Halifax ancestors
and on a day not today
I’ll go, gently lowered. I am
held in all directions by these
countless winding roads
braiding rope, like this
holding me to you
Salicornia Pacifica
Crisp viridescent grass at low tide
pompom the rocks
bouquet of snakes slithering toward sunlight,
quivering in rain. Fields of it, I read.
I salivate thinking of salty bursts
picking fists full, chewing it raw.
Sawdust and sewage coat their scales
turns them yellow.
Tidal feast became
stumpland.
I walk back up the hill to my door
Check air quality index, wildfire maps,
swimming advisories of the Burrard Inlet,
the cost of groceries. I get excited about an app that
gives away old food, and
full of spite, plan
to bring babies into this
suffering world
anyway