Red Hill
BY ANDREW CHI KEONG YIM
Kapūkakī
I can’t remember the time I was born.
Is that a stupid thing to say? I can’t say
I ever knew it, not to the moment, wristwatch
pressed to my newborn eye, my mother
cut open beside me.This frustrates my friends
who want to know my rising sign, who want
to understand why I am who I am.
I tell them maybe afternoon, definitely not morning,
and this seems to make them more upset.
I know I was six weeks early, barely made
my way into a life, that I almost took
my mother along with me.This was on Red Hill,
in the hospital built like a row of teeth.
Red Hill, known to the Navy as the military’s
largest gas station: 250 million gallons of fuel
placed directly above O‘ahu’s main aquifer.
I am an ocean and continent from home
when 20,000 gallons leak into the wells—
jet fuel in the water, forever chemicals
striating in the blood of my neighbors:
Kānaka stewarding the waters for millennia,
Swap Meet uncles who barter on Sundays,
passengers resting on city buses day and night,
the daily betrayed, tens of thousands now
living with chronic illness, relocated, displaced.
I live amid waste, in the heart of America,
brewing coffee then forgetting it, showering
twice because I’m sad. Where I am, the winter
makes the lake into a temporary land. My friends
coax me to the middle of it and I follow, unsteady.
I hear them marvel at the magic of it, the sky
bright and full of balloons. But my eyes are on
the shore, my mind fixed on the work of return.
