I have written this poem in English
because it is the only language that I can speak.
The words have been branded onto my brown skin,
letters signed in so deep
that the charring has never truly healed.
If you look at my face close enough you can see
Anglo prose flash hot white,
like blood rushing to the surface.
I sometimes wonder
what it is like
to look truly Japanese.
Though my hair is charcoal black
and pinpricks my fingers,
trying to break through skin
so that it can mix with my blood,
my eyelids’ epicanthic folds are not
prominent enough to give me
that incriminating Asian slant.
The one ingredient necessary
for an unmistakably Oriental
individual.
I sometimes wonder
if before I was born
my ancestors desperately wanted me
to not look like someone
that people would call a chink,
tugging at my eyelids
this way and that,
pulling them open
to protect me and to also gift
me the ability to spot
all of the ways in which people
often fling racial slurs
without truly saying them.
I have written many poems in English
about not feeling Japanese enough
hoping that the letters will grow tired
of my ethnic tirades
and slide off my tongue
like butter from a hot knife.
At dinner I down entire bottles
of tonkatsu sauce and shoyu
trying to taste the words
from what has to be
my native tongue.
I have engorged myself with Japan
in an attempt to digest the secrets
of the language in between bites.
My great aunt’s newspaper clippings.
Could-have-been conversations
from long-dead relatives.
The kanji for my middle name.
Somewhere in the midst of the frenzy,
I must have swallowed the paper
along with the cookie.
Because despite my consumption
of the country,
butter still stains
my palate.
