{"id":1437,"date":"2020-09-02T09:55:02","date_gmt":"2020-09-02T14:55:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thespectaclstg.wpengine.com\/?p=1437"},"modified":"2021-05-18T14:46:26","modified_gmt":"2021-05-18T19:46:26","slug":"1437","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/?p=1437","title":{"rendered":"Poetry by Laurel Nakanishi"},"content":{"rendered":"

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MY BROTHER, IN EIGHT PANELS<\/h4>\n
\nThey say he looks foreign, my brother. They say he steams kale. They say he eats as he walks: lunch hour, shoving a burrito into his mouth. They avoid saying hello at these times. They say he never wants to return home. Was it the sun pouring into his cement-walled room all through our childhood? They say he is happy with the distance that oceans make.
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\nWith the distance that oceans make, over the remains of a dinner that we have eaten too quickly, in a B-rate Malaysian restaurant, we try for a pleasant conversation: work, his dog, cellphones, media, his dog again. He slouches back into his chair, jabbing the table with the tip of his hashi<\/em>. I\u2019ve leaned back too. The waiter brings another pot of tea. For a moment, we both watch steam rise from the spout.
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\nSteam rises from the spout of Grandma\u2019s teapot. My brother ducks under the table and scoots past the tangle of chair legs. I follow, bowing \u201cGochisosama!\u201d<\/em> and race after him. In the yard: \u201cLook, that tree has sprouted pennies,\u201d he says, plucking a coin from the bark crease. \u201cWow, a dime!\u201d I call, pointing to where I had wedged it just that morning. It is a fine trick. We search the bark until the night comes shuttering our eyes. My brother pats the trunk and says, \u201cThank you, money tree.\u201d I marvel at his gullibility. He walks away jangling pockets full of my change.
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\nWith pockets full of our father\u2019s money, we make for the pier. We are not elegant, but I have just emerged from my first year of college, so we will eat in the finest restaurant in town. The Puget Sound makes quiet waves. \u201cIf you only had twelve hours to live,\u201d he says, \u201cI would take you to meet this famous poet. I don\u2019t read that stuff, but most people know of her.\u201d
\n            \u201cI suppose that is when poetry matters most,\u201d I say. \u201cAnd what would you do? If you only had twelve hours?\u201d
\n            \u201cI would tell off everyone who has been an asshole to me.\u201d
\n            We watched each other over the cutlery.
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\nWe watch; we are each other\u2019s keeper of time, of those past selves running through the bamboo forest or catching guppies with green nets. Somewhere still we are marching through the house singing the appleskin<\/em> song. We are mid-summer, scratching rock drawings. When I say that I don\u2019t know him, it\u2019s not true. And yet, what do I really know?
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\nWhat do I really know? At sixteen he took a pickax and swung it high above his head. Swung it unskillfully, but with strength. His arms were too long for his body then. The pickax made a great arc before coming down on the money tree. Its branches snapped too easily, so he bludgeoned a boulder, the one I thought looked like a dinosaur\u2019s head. He hit it again and again, gouging white dust from the rock.
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\nFrom the rock, from the crucible of deadline and fever-stress, my brother shapes his genius. From catastrophe, from breach, from the buzz of almost-ruin, my brother plucks just the right words. How he works. How he works. \u201cHi. sorry can\u2019t talk at work.\u201d Years of silence, then just the right words, thrown down to me like crumbs: \u201cI\u2019m proud of you. I hope the rest of us can learn from your kind soul.\u201d
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\nI hope the rest of us can learn what to do with these rinds, these scraps; I am always starving with you. Oh, my brother, my beautiful heretic, what else is left for us? This street? Its yellowing light? The corner where you chipped your tooth and I held your chin, bloody, to peer up into your hurt. Brother, I know you do not read poetry. Still the day ended here. We walked home in silhouettes, failing indigo. Porch lights flickered on. We moved deeper in, farther away, tending the silences in our own feral minds.<\/div>\n

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DRIVING TO THE NORTH SHORE, I IMAGINE MY BROTHER<\/h4>\n
not estranged, but there with me\nas the ironwoods along the highway\nlace a brief tunnel - eclipsing\nthe sky - then breathe us out\nagain.  Red dirt loose\nin the fields where the pineapple grew,\nwhere sugarcane, where our grandparents\nsang hole hole bushi:\nMy husband cuts the cane stalks, \nAnd I trim the leaves \u2013<\/em>\nSlipping down the hill\nfrom Schofield Barracks to the North Shore,\nthe road twists. Crosses\npunctuate the millage.\nMy brother lifts his feet\nfrom the dashboard\nand turns to look at me.\nHis gaze is gentle\nlike the folding valleys of the Waianae range.\nAnd he is not looking at me,\nbut at the peaks, remembering,\nperhaps, that hike to Peacock Flats \u2013\nhow we barely made it, scrambling,\nholding our rubber slippers\nin our hands.  And finally\nthe view from the top \u2013 the whole coastline\nfrom Ka\u2018ena Point to Haleiwa.\nThe waves breaking offshore.\nThe great blue welcome of horizon.\nI remember it vividly \u2013 a fluke\nof childhood because, in truth,\nI was not there.  My brother\nstood alone, panting, victorious,\nlooking down at the patchwork island,\nat the stories he wove\nfor a sister who would\nbelieve anything of him.\n\n<\/pre>\n
 
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Laurel Nakanishi is a poet, educator, and author of the book, Ashore<\/i>. She was born and raised in Kap\u0101lama (O\u2018ahu, Hawai\u2018i) and has been fortunate to live in Nicaragua, with a scholarship from the Fulbright Foundation, and in Japan, with a fellowship from the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission. Her poetry and essays have appeared in various literary magazines and a prize-winning chapbook, M\u0101noa|Makai<\/i>. Laurel received her MFA in poetry from the University of Montana and her MFA in creative nonfiction from Florida International University. She currently teaches poetry to children on the island of O\u2018ahu. www.laurelnakanishi.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
MY BROTHER, IN EIGHT PANELS | DRIVING TO THE NORTH SHORE, I IMAGINE MY BROTHER<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1438,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1437"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1437\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}