Author

Jordan Okumura

The Boy Halfway – Site of Collision

This story is part of a larger piece still becoming. For the stories lost inside those who have forgotten…

I know of only seven objects in the solar system – The boy carrying a leather bag of noises that sounded like war. The craters he left behind in his absence. The explosion from the gas stove in November. A smile left at the bottom of a photograph by a camera that slipped from Papa’s hands. A baby boy lifting himself towards the eye of a hurricane. An old man peering through the outside of a keyhole. And the wave that washed his mind away.

The man, the uncle, the boy, the life set adrift, sits on the other side of the keyhole under a sky that is cracking beneath the weight of his mind, inside of a body that is collapsing. The humidity in the air smells blue, but he cannot remember if his sister is still alive.

His body a catalog of histories locked in the twine of skin he forgets are his fingers

and there are no stars tonight.

Two shining eyes pass him by slowly and a car engine revs music into the night. The composed life, the subtle dream, the unknown staccato story, rumbles into the dusk about love and touch and the sweat that writes the caress. Words that seem to come from the belly of an animal.

How touch can spell

a sentence

on the skin.

Something he does not know to be true or untrue, as he cannot remember the last time he has been touched or has touched and suddenly the tips of his twined fingers seem to be slipping away and he feels like a map of closed windows.

His heart is a house burning and he remembers the night his father melted into ghost in an accident at their family home, when the camp stove grew angry and did not give warning before washing his father in light.

His mother would tell people that her son

this him

That her son and other children we have lost, died for a noble cause.

But he was still here, sitting on the other side of a keyhole where his sister had told her children, his nieces and nephews, not to answer the door for he thought the world was dead.

He tried to look through the peephole imagining himself a little star, but could not remember how this sort of thing worked.

September 27, 1932

has always sounded like rustling paper, tethered to the slick hide of a dream. My goodnight, Uncle.

Could not remember who he was yesterday or what color his eyes were or if his sister was really dead. But he is of the Father, you see, and can only be cured by the rain. But the cross will not save him now.

These skinnames are speaking to him, and he is sure that his sister is dead, for he has been standing outside her door for breaths and breaths and can only hear the sounds inside of children crying.

They must be ghosts. Last words, he whispers.

Presses his lips to the door.

Mother daughter sister brother father fire.

The rain begins to fall.

July 17, 2017 0 comment

Fiction Writing

Strata:Origin – Second Skin

written by Jordan Okumura

The climate is calling.

I try and reconcile the family into one topography. It is still only a dream. Wrapped inside the throat, dry of sound. The archaeology of a myth that sat on its haunches outside a silkworm farm, a stone’s throw from Hiroshima. This story folds our fault lines in half.

It’s how the crow flies, Grandma tells me.

Grandma is a child unbound outside the burning of her country. Flash of light. Japan, a cinder, a match, in the water of our history.

She is dressed so that her lower half is hidden behind layers of silk, embroidered symbols of moonlight farms, the shadow of a mountain, its body like a rugged tongue against the flat of night.

On her top half she is bare, like an animal, small and lineless. Like fog just forming. A rib cage, the nape of her neck, her hair bound away from her face by her aunt’s loom of fingertips.

She refuses to submerge into the current of the clothing.

Her aunt forces her onto the ground, pushes her toward the waves settled at her waist. Calls her downward like the line of symbols Grandma writes to recreate memory. She claws at the weeds, sees a silkworm in the wild grass. Watches the small body inch toward her.

It begins to cover the space of her scent with the green of mulberry leaves.

Her aunt is persistent with arms that have the advantage of gravity,

Of spaces turned inside out by lifting and shuffling earth to fill fractures in the land.

Grandma looks up.

Sees the black teeth waiting for her in Hiroshima. A thick root of tobacco between her aunt’s lips.

Grandma hears the laughter of a woman, too much like a man, to be real. The grandmother who is a daughter, who is a mother, slips into the clothes and away from the earth.

This is not where the story begins, but in a boarding house in Woodland where her father plays cards to silence time passing. He sits on a crate from the farm where he has a small plot of rented land for vegetables. His voice sounds like the husking of corn and he smells of the new country, of a language that lays horizontally on the page. Inching along to fight space in place of light.

Her father beats his hands against the tops of his thighs as the cigarette ash sifts heat onto his laps. He turns to look at the open door the boarding house. The father sees his daughter attempt to pull herself from the ground outside Hiroshima. He thinks he sees her teeth turn black. The father remembers a story he was told in the early morning of his birth. A chill unravels through his body.

To break the dream, he takes his cigarette and throws it towards the girl. The daughter.

Grandma bursts,

into flame.

Sweat-lined, she moves closer to the blood on the floor. There are no knives tonight, or memories of drowning in fire.

She is remembering things again.

The station, the room, the chair in the corner, the ticket, the name, the number, the small bead of blood that dripped from her nose onto the paper.

She signed her name with violence.

Everywhere.

March 10, 2017 0 comment

Art Fiction Poetry Random Writing

Archeology of Ashes: Remembrance by Allison Harden, Rebecca Woolston, and Jordan Okumura

written by Jordan Okumura

This is a collaboration between three writers, Allison Harden, Rebecca Woolston and myself. We gather here to excavate through writing. This is one of many sections to come as we tangle and untangle our histories. If you would like to read Part 1 & Part 2, please visit the links at the end of the text.

…Part 3…

I dreamt of you the other night. That inside my dream, I was dreaming, and you came to me to say you were leaving us. That it was time to go. I repeated what you said, asked how, said no, you can’t. We can’t lose you a second time. How does one understand losing someone twice like this?

Maybe this is all so selfish, to want to keep you lingering in my words, to keep you bound to the page like this. To try to recreate some part of your breath, to construct a body sheathed in paper skin to carry around in my pocket. A resurrection of sorts. But everybody knows not to bring the dead back to life. They simply have changed. But I think about how the seasons have flipped on us, there was so much loss in the spring, so much that tucked itself beneath our nails. And the fall is full of life, emerging from the early mornings and held in the heat of our mouths. Maybe this makes sense in the meaning of your name, black and white. It depends. That constant pull of opposing energies. Maybe this is what you meant when you said you were leaving us, that you found the seam between the colors to press through. That finally, there was a space that was comfortable, that felt right, that was home.

There is so much in life that is unexpected. So much that we plan for, that we try to be prepared for, but some days it is never enough. The events are always in motion, ready to hit when we do not expect. The scars are always returning, reminding, reshaping the way the skin was cut open and the blood ran and the frayed edges of flesh gathered together to seal the wound. A scar is a place of memory, of intrusion, of the unexpected resting in our bodies. A reminder of who we were and who we want to be. How do we seek the scars of the disappeared? How do we carry the names of the dead in our mouths without speaking with the weighted loss of you? How does the fabric of our skin fit everything that is inside?

When you moved, if I thought of you I saw the scar near your bicep. When I close my eyes to not see, for a moment, a world without you, the scar rises. A small mound of your pale flesh, healed over. I don’t even know how you got it.

Suddenly, I realize, I cannot imagine having a child in the year of your death.

I didn’t mean to offend my mom when I told her I couldn’t stay in the the downstairs guest room. Particularly this time of year, Thanksgiving, Christmas. There is too much turmoil. Too much loss. Too many associations with a time that still seems like a faded memory of someone else’s life. I find myself wanting to skip over this time of year, but every year it becomes easier. Every year, you are a little more distant. Every year there are new joys. Bing Crosby and peppermint bark. Laughter over the homemade ornaments from grade school. The snowman with the painted on red smile that is way too wide in proportion to the rest of his face. Every year there is someone else to imagine. Some glimmer to grasp onto amid the cavern of you.

She unwrapped the gift as if it were a child. The wild desire of it all. Inside, there were two silk bookmarks. One for the day she she was born and one for the day that she would die. They were wrapped inside layers of letters that her sisters had written to each other when they were teenagers. Whispers in the dark. The beauty of becoming and unraveling. When memory sat like stones to be touched and tasted and lit under water. This gravity. This brush of skin against the bark of their histories. The rings widening till even the memories touched each other.

A morning prayer against the still.

Her dreams of dreaming again.

Like my mother who says she never dreams. These women locked inside the treasure of a memory that will not open toward other stories. There was the one night in Cambodia, the bones in the ground were talking, the clocks in the hotel could not be baited to work, and my mother dreamed. This is the only memory her and I share of her dreaming. She had no words to tell me her dreams. Her language was burned to the quick. These are the dreams I would die for. Again and again until I am nothing but breath and desire. To begin again.

“In my end is my beginning,” these are the words from T.S. Eliot that inspire me. These words I remember first reading freshman year of college, under candlelight. I found them again on the streets of Oxford on a bookstore shelf. I shared them with a friend over wine and ocean waves. Our voices echoing in the dark. These are the words that consoled me through ending something that wasn’t supposed to end. That I vowed would last forever.

Somewhere along the way, we close our eyes to what is impossible for us to see. We shut out the darkness because we can’t imagine the light that will come next. We look the other direction when the sun is already rising to greet us. We forget.

I blinked my eyes open to a beginning that had already begun. Had been beginning.

We stand around the table in a circle and share one thing we are thankful for. I think of how I have begun and ended. And began. Again. And again.

And again.

We both dreamt of you last night and I thought that must mean you were in the room with us. That you came and rested with our bodies, whispered into our ears to create an image of you, threading secrets and desires of who you were. These dreams, the only way to create new memories. We watched home movies, sitting in the room with the family, your voice so loud, so clear. The familiar movements of you, the expressions of your face. To be on this side, reaching toward a screen for a lost reality. On the drive home, we shared the silence, replaying you in our minds. I said, it was nice to be in a world again where you existed.

Collapse the panorama of our home into a story. If only we could build something that wouldn’t tear and field grief, but swell away from loss. From the paper dolls that make up our myth and our twinning, we begin. Hidden in the walls of the home built from star thistle, butterfly wings, and the belly of the sky, we find the house burning toward water, till the air is so saturated with ash and skin and dust that water droplets form.

Until fire and water collide.

There is a bench near the water. I remember sitting there in the wake of you. It was August but the air felt like December. The first chill. I sat mesmerized by the eternity of the waves. How they would be always be there, have always been there, and would continue to be there. No matter what happened with me or you, they would remain the same. It seemed a thought too vast to comprehend, and I don’t know if it comforted or frightened me.

I returned to this bench the other day on a run and took a photograph of its shadows. Thought of the shadow of you and a time that has dissolved like whitewash sinking into sand.

It’s easy to think of you. And the holidays push you forward, press against the longing. I told your mother some days still catch me off guard. That somehow I forgot you were gone and suddenly I see your picture and remember everything. Remember the ashes, the days in your house, the holidays and foosball table games in the wide living room. It’s scary to think the time is moving so far away from your leaving; that it has almost been a year. Scary to think how quickly time passes and that this is our life now, without you. But that’s what they say about the dead: we are left with lives still moving, escaping us.

She leaves behind only the fracture of a memory now. The sisters all fading towards the dirt, towards fire. Will they wash your bones in the heat, scrub the scent that 90 years builds between skinnames, will the fissure left in the rock where you whispered the secrets of grandpa’s haunting still remain?

Your legs are crossed as you sit in the shadow, that is a rumor, that is a last kiss.

This story,

is an offering.

This story,

is your trace.

This story of you that I cannot finish. To keep you present, hanging from the threads of our lives, twisting around our bones. Replicate the sinews. To think how raw this is, how present the wound grows. This year, so full of extremes. The accordion of life spanning all these months. In the time since you left, a new life has emerged.

And there is the saying people like to offer, that it will get better in time, that everything happens for a reason. To say this will heal with time is to suggest your memory will fade, that you will blur and escape the wrinkles of our minds. That your photographs, too, will burn and your voice turn to smoke. To say your death had a purpose is difficult to understand. That, somewhere in another timeline, there was a secret, alternative fate worse than this.

How can we ever feel like you were supposed to die?

I find myself repeating similar sayings to console a friend. It will get easier. You’d be surprised how you might feel in a year. Words I rejected when they were spoken to me. Words I couldn’t hear because my ears my brain my head were ringing of only you. Impossible then to imagine I would ever go a day without thinking of you. That I had space left to be filled with anything other than you. The echo of my voice mouthing these words. The tongue of a flame lit from your ashes.

But no, everything does not happen for a reason. Everything happens because it does. We choose to find beauty and meaning in the sacred moments we are given because they are all we have. We continue because continuing is our only option. We try to make sense of what will never make sense. We dream. We bury. We bleed. We carry. We carry on.

We burn.

Those beautiful cracks in the veneer that create caverns toward bone. Fold your story in muscle, slide the century into the folds of noon, and let the river return home.

We began remembering the day we were born, each other. We have the same dream of flying that is full of baked brown leather shoes, laces bound to each other’s, our bodies the binding. We lift the way leaves dream on the belly of the wind, just out of reach of our body religion. This dream is a whisper.

Loss utters its own sentences to replace, to refine, to fracture memory.

I remember you most in December, your beauty a howl, a thread left lingering, you body a trick of light.

But most important, I remember.

We used to have a box packed tight, resting high on the shelf in the garage. Full of a shared Christmas, but I didn’t like the colors. We carried it for years, only because it was tied to you. I can remember exactly where I placed it, what it looked like all those times we walked past it. But I cannot recall what happened to the box, except that it is no longer here.

Sometimes, I marvel at my ability to force a forgetfulness, to turn time over and throw all the leftovers away. As if I were cleaning out the fridge of my memory. It bothers me when stuff doesn’t have a place to go. But I am realizing so much of life is extraneous, doesn’t have a place, and we are all just playing Tetris and hoping the pieces fit together as long as they can.

I never had a desire to use what was in that box. But, like everything you left behind, I think about how it was another piece of you that we could have filled in your absence. I was pleased the day I packed it, everything fit together perfectly. Like the box was made to contain those remnants. If only our memories could be so clear. So neatly packed. So ordered, resting in a room lined with shelves. But they are jumbled, transforming, resurrecting through erasures in moments we realize we need them.

To say to you, I’m sorry.

This alchemy that stores and respires. The box grows gills, feathered pink fingers, what you hear you think is a voice before drifting off towards awake.

I piece together drifts of paper. Continue to piece them toward solace even though the box has been given to some third cousin or slipped behind an old mattress in the garage. Maybe it wills its resting place in the ashes that call your name. Not quite ready. Some smell like the earth in Tule Lake, branded by government stamps and cool recollections of a war that wasn’t yours. There was no line for you to stand beside. There was no side, just the coarse grain of the paper battered by old typewriters. And a single signature that you tried to rescue from your history. The one that said you would stay forever allegiant, the one that bound your name in distance.

It was dance I didn’t know that you hid behind laugh lines and dementia. I want to suture your story, but the only truth I have is my own. Would I slip you further into the shadow, if I told your myth without you.

It was folded only once in half, so not to be concealed, but beckoned. That article of the burning girl, that you kept in that box. She was not family, maybe a friend, her body fueled a flame that took her life. I feel the heat now, of what you must have felt when you held that old newspaper clipping. I see the jagged edge where the cut became a tear. Did you do it as you read her name aloud, the body violent in the fire of this loss.

My father wrapped his quiet eyes around a corner in the hallway.

Sugarbear

It was more of an order, and an offering. Return to the dream.

There is a photograph of my father and I, wading in light, just on the border of shadow. My head against his chest, small child attached to the gills of my father. This is my last memory of safety. But there is no real memory, just a shimmer in the corner of the story.

This blood-letting towards life,

it’s a topography ever changing,

writing our ruins against the page.

……..

Part 1 – Archeology of Ashes: Beginnings

Part 2 – Archeology of Ashes: Eruptions and Dislocations

December 10, 2015 0 comment

Conversation Fiction Poetry Random Writing

Archeology of Ashes: Eruptions and Dislocations by Allison Harden, Rebecca Woolston, and Jordan Okumura

written by Jordan Okumura

This is a collaboration between three writers who are excavating through writing. This is one of many sections to come as we tangle and untangle our histories.

…Part 2…

I keep cleaning the rooms, sifting through you, a way to keep you alive. I like to think you are floating in our air. I wiped the dust from your frame yesterday and looked at your face. I realized I hadn’t seen you in a long time. That I kept you blurry in my memory. Maybe not wanting or not able to build the structure of your face. How do we put a body back together again?

What I’m trying to say is, there is always a piece missing. Your ashes have been mixed and separated and moved and there are bits of dust that have gotten away and I think about this movement of the dead often. The trails you have left. The ashes of others in the air, maybe even you, it was only the day before. Tiny bits resting on the printed fabric book bag they put your box in. They were everywhere and I thought we had to leave. Get on the plane, get away from this place, the grayness was suffocating and the barren slow passing of time would kill us all. This madness of grief. I was searching for you, along the stretches of road, but I knew you weren’t there. You were in the front seat, wrapped in your box with a name tag and everything. I thought of the people working at the crematorium, wondered who would ever want a job like that. The arrangement of the lost, the attempt at organizing a life after a cataclysmic puncture. Do they always smell like burnt flesh? Does the person who placed the body in the oven see its loved ones? What might that feel like, to look in the eyes and know you were the last person to see the body of their lost one? What kinds of secrets do they witness? How many spirits follow them around?

It is amazing to me, how structures hold together when everything else refuses. How our bodies continue to pump blood and breathe air when we are no longer capable of doing anything but lying on the floor.

To dream of you. To dream of a before. Of a time when this was never going to be part of our story.

There is also the girl, the woman. Looking to wane into ghost. Is she all of us. Is she the soft periphery that haunts us. Moves like a sheet hanging in the air between us. The her that is returning to baby. To child. I will hold her in the pit of a peach, to hear her speak a name. The hollow i’ve dug in search of your answers, are faulty at the rib. The blue myth wrapping her away from the family around her, pulling her wide, pulling her quiet face from the collar of a black and white photograph. A return to sepia, to skin.

She is my child, my memory making up stories. She is a return to the thread that began this story. She is a small boy left burning in the fire. She is a man standing at the edge of the earth, bound in water.

Here is where I dream of you. Now that the autumn has come and you have been gone for three years. Why your last words to me, haunt me. And by last, I mean the last words I can remember. You spoke to me for a year after these words fell like sand into my hands. Your moment of clarity and only I was there. The un-daughter, the niece, the sister, the never-mother. You said, you were ready. Then you touched the air, touched something that seemed to slide down over your body. Until the the static of the radio and your blood still thick in the vein, was all I could hear.

I could no longer,

hear you.

This stillness of the morning allows me to think of you and all our moments. The slow etching into each other’s lives. I’m confused sometimes in the hazy moments after sleep, thinking I am in the apartment we all shared, that I will hear you in the other room, that you will emerge and see me and say good morning in between your soft singing. We hear songs on the radio that we think you would’ve liked, so we play them over and over. Turn the volume up without saying anything to each other. We are thinking of you and I like to imagine your face and the sound of your voice if you could have ever known this song and played it as you got ready for work.

I have a recording of you saying happy birthday to me. Thank you, forever. I should tell you that most days I am too afraid to listen to it. Too afraid to recognize your voice, maybe it’s better to let the memory age at the edges just a little. To hear your breath. But sometimes, late at night, when I am driving on the freeway, alone in my car I play your message and turn the volume up as loud as I can and your voice fills me so that for those moments I cannot even hear myself.

I don’t care about my birthday anymore. It is too close to your death.

I wonder if you ever listened to my old voicemails. If you ever had late-night moments like I do when you miss the sound of me. If you held onto my words and the moments that surrounded them. I admit that even as recent as a week ago, I played your old messages. Lights off, just before bed. I snuggled up next to your voice. Wishing I could feel the warmth of your body now, these years later. Your arm around me. The last time I saw you, your arm was around her. I slipped past the both of you. I don’t think you saw me.

In the recordings, you sound so youthful and full of boyish joy. Unashamed giddiness. Recklessly in love. “Hi babe. Hello beautiful. I can’t wait to see you. I love you.” Fragments of love captured in these short sound bites. These tears.

Find the ghost inside this echo, she says. The shrapnel from your war. I assume your body, lean in close to find you in an eye, in a knuckle, in the wedge of a wrinkle. The suture is a place for entering blood memories.

Wet alfalfa, the rooster’s timing so off that we wake before it calls day, the plastic amber light we filtered through your broaches. You are the last of our storytellers, you are the

last to know that I look like my father, carry his rage, his tongue hinged like fault lines in the earth.

Waiting to give way.

November 2, 2015 0 comment

Fiction Poetry Writing

Archeology of Ashes: Beginnings by Allison Harden, Rebecca Woolston, and Jordan Okumura

written by Jordan Okumura

This is a collaboration between three writers who are excavating through writing. This is one of many sections to come as we tangle and untangle our histories.

…Part 1…

It’s been seven months since the fire. The ashes return to my mouth, dust gathers around the frame.Trails of flame followed us across states and always this desire to not let you go. To keep you breathing, somehow, through a photograph, a memory that rises in moments of forgetting.The incense burns in front of your face, your bones. Your passing: a canyon in our bodies. A rearrangement of everything we knew.

But not without dew, as the bones rearrange. The wet of our winter that guards against the flame. The dew as small as a memory, light as a ghost. In the lacuna of the photograph we gather our losses for the burning. The fire that cleanses, that lifts the leaves of our story high into the belly of the sky. This us, this you. Still tethered to the constellation of a name.

Loosen the tongue from your teeth.

Wrap a vein around the earth till our bodies touch again.

When we met, you wore a pink belt. You stood up from your desk chair and turned toward me. I shook your hand and felt an electric wave pulse through my veins. Your pale blue eyes. My heart beating the beat that knew already, even in that brief moment, that nothing would ever be the same. My lips parted to say hello, and I couldn’t breathe. My lungs tightened in my chest. The color of my blood brightened underneath my skin. My eyes on fire. My palm ablaze.

To speak your name, the letters wrapped around our tongues, pressing against the backs of our teeth. This rage presses against the inside of our skins and I wonder if this is what it was like for you. Anger lava moving slow, rubbing the crust of the back of the skin. Counting the days passing, the mounting pressure. Then a break in the surface. A surge. A volcano. But I thought once it was a geyser. The heat of your scars. I wanted the water to touch you, your burnt skin as you tried to open the body, let loose the wounds.

The map of this love from heart to fingertip. Vena amoris. You told me that story after we lost the war. The one that slipped blood into the ground of our lives. The rift in the ground where the earth cracked open but would not offer water. This cataclysm. The mud pulling away from us. Until even silence had sounds and a petal to place on your tongue. Can we lift the light to eat the shadows. Can the baby be born from a root placed in the ground during the drought. The drought that is a voice, that is a baptism, that is a return. Vena amoris, the stream that still has the abandon to dream.

I can’t bury the bodies in the ground. All the people we created in light of the lack of us. Our twinning to create a story that singes. Light a match against the twist in the bed sheet. A pink flower on the nightstand. Burrowing back toward wood. To begin again. To be born of ash.

This,

light

against

the coming storm.

I had imagined this so many times, but in the moment, my hands moved on their own, my body detached from my heart. I felt you but didn’t feel you. I felt the cool air, the mist of the waves. I saw you were there, but didn’t see you in the dark.

It occurred to me in that moment that maybe we were always in the dark, and maybe you were always there but really not there. And maybe your touch was so deep that I never really felt it because its indentation had already changed the shape of my skin, the muscles beneath it.

Maybe all we ever are is an evolution of ourselves, our skin always stretching to hold all of us in. The expansions and retractions. How do we ever know who we are? Some days we are everything to each other. Some days I don’t recognize my own breath. The startling noise of lungs filling themselves. After the fire, it occurred to me there is no way to stop this. The flames burnt everything we knew, but your house still stands. It was there to scavenge through, to smell the smell of your burning, those last moments of your flesh.

The center cannot hold. The neighbors at first hated to see the structure, the right side sloping toward the earth, reaching to the ash, to the return, as if the wood of that house came exactly from that spot of land. Rooted from long ago. The neighbors hated the reminder that the body becomes earth after death. That even if they believed in Heaven or Hell, there is no way to fight body being left behind to become ashes or rot slowly in a box in the ground. Then the months passed, and they began to like your half burned house. Big things don’t happen in small towns. The father wanted the house torn down, uprooted. Erased. Show the ripe pink flesh so the wound can heal. The town wouldn’t let him, wanted to say to any visitor, “That’s the house of the Lost Boy. Got burnt up inside, right there where the beam don’t sit straight. See? Nobody knew till too late. He didn’t make it out. Imagine that.” The glamor of other people’s tragedies. All of this said between tobacco spits, the tar landing on the earth of his overgrown garden. They don’t see where it lands, cannot turn away from the image as they worked the thought out of their minds that they were glad the house was set back away from the street, don’t have to see it if you don’t want to. Don’t have to get too close case his spirit comes. Might be he believed in God. Might be he didn’t, but don’t know where he went. His brother told me he got the hell away from that place though.

Still, they do not understand how his center was not holding, and our lungs keep going, but we are not breathing, and that some days our skin is ripping from the stretching of keeping all of his memories and breaths and movements in.

The inability to let the dead rest. Listening to the lullaby of your bone bits rattling in their box.

The ghosts will always surface. She was a ghost I met in memory. Standing there excavating all the old ways. The body spectacle. The lens can be so complex. And I thought I started in a place of childhood, she tells me. But the words come out like the color blue. Bruised but buoyant. Filtered through the light cast through currents. Her words hold space like a votive, on the body of an old birch tree.

That tree has since been caught in the flood, the one that rushed down Independence and Windward, the flood that masqueraded like a daughter with a knotted heart, the one that lifted all the maps in the town library. As if it meant to wash away the grime of the city, toward the beginning of old roads. The movement of fire is like water, both cleansing toward bone. Speaking the marrow, speaking the country roads. Remembering before there was the memory of us.

So blind is the child that doesn’t see her ghost. Wet skin in the frost.

This they we speak of. The disappeared. The Lost Ones. The almost dreams. The shadows against our walls, bumping against the dimension of life. Seek the open window. Follow the letters of the alphabet, the young child saying, “B for brother.” Hug the full belly, this naming of everything we see.

Has your named changed since you left? What does Neverland call you?

We run along what is left of the river and search for memories there. I found one, between the dry riverbed and the skeleton of a fish. You, swimming along the shore, seeing if you could beat us back home. The exhaustion reached us, from smoke filled lungs you called, “don’t do it, save yourselves!” We laughed at the feigned but real desperation, at the sweetness of your voice. I wonder now if you meant more. I wonder now if you still can smell the heat soaked dirt of the river, the dampness of nothing. That place we all grew up along. We are children of this river, of this five mile strip on the south side of the American. The span of elementary to graduate school, beginning at the place, when you were just a name, where your brother first kissed me. We were fourteen under the tree that’s been torn down for years. The place where initials have been carved into logs we cannot find and how everything is familiar, but the years transform the landscape of our memories and the trails disappear so we run the opposite way.

We enter here to feel like maybe we aren’t really in the city, but if we could just find a raft we could float to the ocean. Dip the feet in, lose a shoe in the water, hold a tree branch that reaches over and scare yourself, just a little, with the power of the current. But today, I cannot find the spot where you entered the river and swam toward home. It sank, perhaps months ago, and I walk into the exposed riverbed and consider sifting your ashes so I can pour part of you into the cracks.

I always felt you near the water. That cloudy afternoon in August 2011 when I didn’t know my name. The name I would soon change. The name I had already crossed out on papers and reimagined in a new cursive. My hand still getting used to the looks of it, even though I had signed it for years, before, as the past me. The identity that was already dissolving into you like the mist of the ocean waves and my salty tears.

I didn’t want to go home yet, so I drove down Newport avenue to the beach wall. The place I would escape to on my 30-minute breaks during my shift at the ice cream shop. I would immerse myself fully into the saltwater, rinse off the sweat and sticky waffle cone bits. Return, my hair soaking. My skin the smell of the sea.

I scanned the horizon looking for you and found you, there, sitting right next to me in a song.

This is our archeology. Our reverie. Three times you have left in the night, disappeared in the sheets, in the stratification of our sentences. Our histories left like artifacts wrapped in the roots of trees where we buried your photograph. I imagine it has been bound by the arms of these roots, that they curl into our smiles, to rewrite chronology. Bleed backwards. We dream in hieroglyphs, they speak to us in sediment and silt.

These three, monolithic, always a brother, a boy wet with sun, a child only growing now in memory.

We three.

The strata.

Building breath, out of a story of loss.

October 17, 2015 0 comment

Fiction Writing

The Flood

written by Jordan Okumura

Let’s pretend it’s before, before a moment could be gone. This you, that is lost in the body of a catacomb. In the long frequencies at sunset. Even before they put up the street signs at Sunrise and Auburn. Before they tore up the hop fields on Capital, before a withered hand held out a photograph for our sepia story.

Let’s write another story.

Inside the shell that fits like a ruin inside my body, I hear the memory pacing. The wandering child inside our faulty architecture. The ruin wraps like a banyan tree around what is left of our fossils. I tell you these things because we have the same stack of overturned stones. I tell you these things because you are my lookingglass, my kabuki mask. The roots locked in the tempered lines and thick shadow.

Let’s try and tell the story that happened before your father passed,
before you were outside of far-from ,
his reach,
before you knew the rhetoric inside loss, before the want for water.

When there was just breath. Let’s find the stain that is beautiful, before you knew that a breath could hold silence and a scream. The lexicon of your father’s body. The deep root that was deeper than a gasp, air thin, hands thin, and just your small fingers resting against his back, to be both of the same light. The story of an un-wound small child. Before after.

You pull an image from your pocket, while calf deep in the wet mud of a cornfield In Yuba City. Your father’s car is tracing the edges of the city. From where you stand you part the stalks with your lips. You can hear the blue haze of rain on the horizon. The color of that sound, of that tree-lined street, of that cul-de-sac, of that dent in the fender. The fierce love of wet ground, as night harvests the sky.

Our excavation is still shallow. Your hands in the soil, still pulling at the root burrowing into the ground, at mile-three on the road before the turn, before you lost your father. Maybe if I dream you and your father, I can create the story of my own loss. Pull the weathervane from beneath our trampled leaves. Find the beginning, beneath the queen palm, inside the letter wrapped in photograph, next to our dream.

I would like to believe we can tell the myth that came before the road was paved, before the rows of corn were replanted, before the wood sutured and street signs became metal posts, before the wood broke down, before we were even children made of palm and earth and bone. I see your toys floating with the belly of water. The flood that scrubbed all the rooms clean, baptizing the house. Washing it clean down to the nail, down to the small army of figurines, down to the kiss on the back of the door before hands became sediment. The flood washing the house of your story, the leaves left clinging to the walls after the water had receded, their own veins rigid. I can see the pockets of air under the wallpaper, the paint peeling, your feet so still on the ground, so still that maybe your father can hear you.

So still that maybe our dream can hear us.

Built of uncommon mothers and the voyeur inside our story.

Our story that can wash away, to the ground before.

June 17, 2015 0 comment

Fiction

The Recurring

written by Jordan Okumura

There is a promise of trees, a wet child running through fire, his feet fixed like roots to the stage of her palm. There is a dream there, a fissure worth remembering, a petal that presses the way memories do, toward the surface.

Bend, Oregon. 1994.

The river running slow, her wrists learning how to fly. She sits like a fractured harp creating this story that is an echo, a last offering, a compass rose.

A trick of light, his brown hands covered in charcoal and fish scales. His hands covered with love. Bodies come slowly here to sleep, where they are lost inside their love of waist-high light, the trap door of an ankle, the myth that lies at the rim of her skirt. He can almost smell her ruin before it arrives.

Her overripe star collapsing under and weathervane. The little girl, with stories buried in the root of a ghost, in the thick vein of a knotted fist, in the flower open and bowing.

The little girl, remembers.

She escapes through soot, through the cocoon of a tangled house. This story is a snare.

The child is on fire. The girl burns still.

March 26, 2015 0 comment