Naoko Fujimoto

According to Father, I Can Meet My Daughter Again

My first real chopsticks were made from deer horns.

Father bought them when we went to Nara

after he said, “Pick something that you memorized today,”

and it was not the happiest day, maybe a moderate happiness,

like any ordinary day trip to Nara, I fed deer,

stepped on its droppings, and it ate my skirt.

Later, I thanked Father and he corrected my pronunciation,

“Ha-shi. Not ha-Shi.”

Ha-shi is a pair of chopsticks and ha-Shi is a bridge,

but we cannot make a ha-Shi by planting Ha-shi into steamed rice.

*

The solar flare muffles it

vaporizing the glare

ice which will form the clay into rocks

drifting though the unseen atmosphere,

through the crystalline confetti, we parade

and gather both our hands together

to wait for the meal during those two minutes,

perfectly al dente noodles.

That was our last moment

after emigrating from the Earth,

after spending four years to get to this red dwarf star,

Proxima Centauri b,

right before sipping the first noodles we ever made

and my first-born daughter used chopsticks for the first time.

I do not believe in ghosts,

but I guess,

now I am a sort of like them

looking down on the scorched pebbles and our house

that was made by a portable 3D-printer;

her first chopsticks too,

she chose yellow recycled plastic to mold them.

There was no Ha-shi rising into the sky

to mourn us; perhaps, the sky did not look like the Earth’s;

with a red sun and its two yellow siblings.

She could not have the life that I had;

after receiving her first pair of chopsticks,

we would joke about the three pronunciations of Ha-shi.

Did I tell you there is one more? Ha-Shi, the edge of something;

ha-Shi of ha-Shi?

*

We used to believe

with one moving heart,

and brain,

arms, legs, organs too,

(Father’s heart moves, but his brain doesn’t)

that the Earth had an edge before a huge waterfall,

and we kept rowing anyway. We all wondered why we navigated

toward this particular star,

for what purpose;

for what we need to achieve there,

Dear God, blesse us—

Dear Ancestors, guild us—

and please answer why we have gravity.

*

We were killed like weeds.

*

Father believes in reincarnation,

so I automatically inherited his thoughts

in his sleep,

he is consuming his karma,

or so I thought when I sat by his bed.

Her hands were gone

before she used chopsticks appropriately.

Does she repeat being born until she clears this task?

(Game Over blinked above her head.)

perhaps that was her goal,

having her first pair before the solar flare,

which means that she could be reincarnated to another life.

(Spiritual Level Up!)

*

I was happy

when I placed bowls on a dining table,

and gave her the yellow chopsticks,

which was a sort of my achievement

(I grew wheat and made noodles

for her who had never tasted kishimen-noodle),

a simple lunch anywhere in my country.

*

Occasionally people freeze

when they see my transparent body without legs

in a white kimono with a little triangle on my forehead,

floating like a stereotypical Japanese ghost

(Hokusai drew it)

at the corner of Father’s room

(I am twisting my curled fog)

in generic pale walls.

I always open his curtain, so nurses can see him

in the corner of their eyes.

Urameshiya

(People scream, again) and I want to curse things I believe in.

*

From the window, this cherry blossom tree blooms first,

always before the other ones.

The root makes the family gravestone tilt.

Does it suck the ashes of whomever is placed under there;

so what now with my floating body flying in circles

like a fruit fly—it refuses to mumble any

holy words, only knowing what Father sang.