For the next few months, we have the pleasure and privilege of being able to feature selections in the upcoming anthology, The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration (eds., Brynn Saito and Brandon Shimoda, Haymarket Books, 2025). This month, I am excited to feature two writers, Sansei writer Sharon Hashimoto, hailing from the Pacific Northwest, and Yonsei poet and artist Syd Westley, based in Oakland. Their poems nudge us to grapple with memory itself—the memory passed on, the memory that remains a question, the memory as meaning behind how and why we remember.

— traci kato-kiriyama

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Syd Westley is a poet and artist based in Oakland, CA. Holding a BA from Stanford and an MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis, their work has been supported and/or published by Lambda Literary, The Adroit Journal, Berkeley Poetry Review, and others. Westley is Yonsei, and their grandparents were interned in Tule Lake and Minidoka. They also write music reviews at Syd Westley Music. 

Elegy Attempts

I pick up my pen and put it back down again who died and what am I trying to do

I have killed many plants I am notorious for overwatering

I am learning new words every day so I can say things that some people have already known

If my grandmother’s ashes are in an urn in Piedmont can I find my way back and how so

Yesterday another trans woman died and I didn’t cry until I couldn’t write a poem about it

There is a word for this in Japanese it does not translate I will not try

I drove seven hours north of Marin to confirm something my grandmother once told me

The sky felt low and suffocating I thought I could not last two days here

How much violence does it take to make me a man I am hurting

After Pulse I did not write for many months I just did things I thought were stupid like yoga

I am not a good child never was what was I saying

I was named after a man I did not know I am turning into him is this a better elegy

When my mother wanted a girl I cut off my hair and left the house

There are memories that I will not write down will they die when I do I really hope so

Can I write a poem about my grandmother without mentioning internment once

There is no resurrection I have given her dresses to Goodwill

In the morning I will climb out of my bed and water my five plants how insufferable can I get

She did not know I kissed girls would she have tried to leave the page

I press hard to the paper until my hand begins to hurt

This poem was originally published in Lantern Review in 2021 and will be republished in The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration (eds., Brynn Saito and Brandon Shimoda, Haymarket Books, 2025).

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Sharon Hashimoto is a Sansei who has lived her whole life in the Pacific Northwest. Her father is from Manoa Valley, Hawai'i; her mother from Wapato, Washington. She writes poems and short stories. Her poetry books are The Crane Wife (Red Hen Press) and More American (Grid Books), winner of the 2022 Washington State Book Award. Stealing Home, a story collection, was published by Grid Books in 2024.

Reparations: My Mother and Heart Mountain

Unrelenting, the sun breaks down the white paint,
and the slight incline of the barracks’ tin roofs

buckles or cracks with the four years
they have weathered. Dust and sweat shine like a cap

of heat on the top of my mother’s black head. Grit
chafes her toes; her shoes scratch the rough door. 

So I imagine her at thirteen. Her memory blurs
the exact picture with the few facts she can recall, 

and I ask her, What do you remember?
She tells me: Your grandmother made us think

it was an adventure to hang blankets at night
and make our own rooms, to fall asleep listening 

to the wind and each other’s coughing
as floodlights filled the slits in the walls

This poem was first published in Prairie Schooner (Fall 1993), reprinted in The Crane Wife, Story Line Press (an imprint of Red Hen Press, 2021), and forthcoming in The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration (eds., Brynn Saito and Brandon Shimoda, Haymarket Books, 2025).

© 2021 Syd Westley; 1993 Sharon Hashimoto