“Genmaicha” by Leanne Toshiko Simpson
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Genmaicha” by Leanne Toshiko Simpson.
Genmaicha
By Leanne Toshiko Simpson
Someone stole Marianne’s cane at a sushi restaurant, but she
doesn’t let it get her down. She teaches me to jitterbug in her living
room, lets the eggs boil into petulant sulphur – a mere whim
of a breakfast once planned. Instead, we drive to Sandown Market,
steer our tiny shopping cart between narrow aisles of words I’ve barely learned.
Kamaboko? Yes. Umeboshi? No. She presses into soft tofu,
leaving deft imprints in wan flesh. Nodding, she beckons me closer, invites me
to gouge my own. It’s fresh today. I sink into its consolation but my fingers
strain, emerge damp and traitorous from another graze with
home. Back in her bungalow, Marianne pours genmaicha with shaking hands
and tells me about the letter her mother received from Hiroshima. Tears leak
into her teacup and I remember that I couldn’t cry when I released a lantern
into the Motoyasu River, that I didn’t even know her mother’s name –
a tourist in my own history. But I also remember when Marianne leapt across
a barn floor to catch my wedding bouquet, how Inouye women have bled
joy and hardship through uprootings and reunions across
oceans and ghost towns alike. What is home
but a recipe for something you didn’t know you craved?
Before I leave, Marianne hands me three stout persimmons from California,
grown on family land returned by a hakujin neighbour, a rare instance of safekeeping.
She trusts me to know when they are ripe, but as always, I wait too long.
Copyright © Leanne Toshiko Simpson
Leanne Toshiko Simpson is a Yonsei writer, educator and psychiatric survivor from Toronto. Leanne is a graduate of UTSC Creative Writing and the University of Guelph’s MFA, and is currently completing an EdD in Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto. Leanne teaches BIPOC literature and disability arts seminars at Trinity College, and her debut novel Never Been Better was released with HarperCollins Canada and Putnam in the U.S. last year.
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