Back to Issue Fifty-Seven

— Isleton, CA

We sip craft beers
in the shadow of the old opium den
t-shirts for sale
a wall of grinning gone faces
framed and hung

The whole street
hollowed out
pale eyes peer at us
from a shuttered
Lee Bros Dry Goods

Nicole tells us about her father’s childhood here
buses boarded to concentration camp
returning to pick pears for housing
on a nice white family’s land

What to do with the silences
They lunched together year after year

It’s Sunday and the war is on
Beneath a bright and cloud-studded sky
the band plays bluegrass
to scattered applause

TO GREAT UNCLE, WHO COOKED 4-5 YEARS FOR MR. STANFORD AT WARM SPRINGS

by JADE CHO

I went looking for you in University Archives
	found:
		palm fronds and winding gardens
white house with women lounging
	the harem of the prize horse preserved in ink.
Paid to write poems, I walk
		under towering palms
	planted by your countrymen’s hands.
Degraded, the governor called us
	dregs who planted, sowed, watered, hoed
his thousand terrible olives,
	dammed the stolen creek,
		tidied his mansion 	filled with silks and screens.
I want to smear my thumb across the photographed mouths, 	unsmiling
				that tasted your birds nest soup
		venerate 	the ranch hands, starched shirts ablaze
			who tilled and tended the barons' spacious graves.
Uncle, I burn at your absence
				but I must learn.
	You walked out of this country
				with no need for its glory songs
		enough gold to build a house
					in Sin How Tuen.
ELEGY


by JADE CHO
I can’t think of Oakland without thinking of your ashes
waiting in the chapel vault for a $300 ceramic urn.
My uncles will visit the columbarium on Qingming
bearing speckled stargazers in plastic sleeves
but I know if you return you won’t be behind the glass.
You’ll glide the four blocks from 10th St to Chinatown
like you and your brothers, overalled, trailing your mother
past crates of durian and new years oranges,
follow the scent of freshly baked bao into the bakery
where another son sits, waiting for his father to finish errands,
slip out the vents, swish through the net above the boys
gangly as you once were playing ball, carrying the children’s shrieks
from the play junk to the lake’s algaed mirror of sky,
where you stop for the sweet and salt perfume of our favorite pho,
crest the steep hills crowned by jagged potholes
to the red steps of 1721, where you join the spirits
who stood watching your childhood crib, briefly, if only
to send a chill up the tenant’s spine, slip into the passenger seat
of your 4-Runner, now Willie’s, as we climb the streets into fog,
where you water the daffodils with the morning’s kiss of mist
lining our path to the front door with yellow, whisk the breeze
through the leaves of your maple’s crimson fan—
This is wishful thinking. In life, you forgot how to be gentle.
At night I listened to you slam cabinets, cuss over the bathroom counter
alone. The father who kneeled laughing to knot my loose shoelaces
long gone. Nothing brings me comfort as I drive down Ashby
past the hospital where I was born, and you lay emaciated,
legs swollen like balloons. Every turn opens onto a street
without you: I trace the map, the veins of my ache,
these roads the quiet pulse that carries on.

author pic here
 Jade Cho  is a poet and educator from Oakland, California. A recent Stegner Fellow and finalist for the National Poetry Series, her poems have appeared in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Adroit Journal, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She believes in the liberation of oppressed people and the end of occupation everywhere, from Palestine to Dzungarstan & Altishahr to Turtle Island.


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