This month, we have the privilege of sharing poetry from the West Coast—a trio of pieces on her mother by San Diego-based, Shin Nisei, Patricia Aya Williams, and one from Bay Area-based, “Nisei-han,” J. Lisa Oyama, about her Dear Obaachan. Whether a blurry photo or a jackpot of memories, all the poems here contend with memory, curiosity, and the details we sometimes hang onto as the past lives on very deeply in the present. Enjoy...

—traci kato-kiriyama

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Patricia Aya Williams grew up in San Jose, the daughter of a Japanese-born mother and an American father. She is a Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize recipient and the author of the mini-chap Haiku for Parents (Origami Poems Project). Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Santa Clara Review, The Good Life Review, Jackdaw Review, and Cathexis Northwest Press, and she has work forthcoming in Whale Road Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Caesura, The Thieving Magpie, and Tupelo Press. She lives in San Diego with her husband, Christopher; a French Bulldog named Binxy Elton; and two houseplants, Isabella Yuki and Mimi Lise.

Listening

My mother’s on the phone, talking about bananas.

I never seen such a green banana before, green green green
Not even one speck of yellow

And about the time a cat got stuck on the roof.

I try to catch her and she squirt away

And then about how she wants a boyfriend but can’t find
anyone suitable.

Sometimes, old man walking slow, you know, so slow…
That turn me off

Even though my hand is cramped from holding the phone,
I don’t want to stop listening.

I want to pour her inside myself.

Soak up her stories, drink them like green tea
though I’ll never tell them as well.

Now she’s talking about how she wakes up her bird, Max.

Time to get up…Cock-a-doodle-doo!

Sumo 

Every other month, Mom watched tournaments on TV Japan.
If we went out, she’d say I gotta be home for sumo.

Sometimes I’d stay with her, enthralled by the spectacle
of massive flesh garbed only in mawashi, stark contrast

with elaborately dressed gyōji who presided. Salt throw
to purify, fists on the ground signal readiness to fight.

Foreigners competed, too—from Mongolia, Bulgaria, Brazil,
Egypt, Ukraine, other countries. Mom always rooted

for wrestlers from her prefecture, Ishikawa. Awww, he too little
he not gonna make it. She also liked the cute ones—those

whose faces glisten with what we might call the opposite
of arrogance. That quintessential Japanese quality: yasashii.

In an old photo taken during their courtship, my father
stands on a beach in Japan with a group of sumo-in-training.

Mom was the fan, but it’s my father who’s in the picture,
my father whose image she wanted to preserve, keep

in a lacquered box for me to discover decades later
along with their engagement rings, a Bible, her rosary.

Fun Bus to Vegas                                                                             

Your first answer to everything either silence
            or No way!
                        Everything, that is,

except Vegas. So Mom, let’s go.
            There’s enough
                        money in the vacation fund 

& I have the time now. The flyer promises fun
            & you’re the only one
                        I want to ghost with—go with,

I mean. My sister was mean to me, you said—
            she had to raise you
                        after your parents died. Your parents

couldn’t help dying. Do you see
            their gaunt, familiar shapes
                        in spinning 7’s, in rotating stems

of cherries & lemons? You press & press,
            but the symbols
                        never stay. The numbers never pay.

If we’re lucky the coins we carry grow up
            to be paper money.
                        Rock, paper, money. We laugh lots

when we’re not at each other’s throats.
            I miss sharing ciggies
                        on the Strip, meeting Elvis

& Marilyn, the way you got Siegfried to come back, lean over
            the stage, shake your hand
                        while Roy minded

the tigers. The audience loved it. You loved
            his rough skin, firm grip,
                        callouses—working man’s hands

you said. At the Riviera you played tic-tac-toe
            with a chicken
                        in a glass box. On the casino floor

you wore the color of money:
            jade necklace, emerald 
                        pinkie ring, little green frog

on the zipper of your fanny pack. The word for frog
            in Japanese: kaeru,
                        which also means

to return. It means something—money, people—
            will return to you.
                        Maybe what it means

is a jackpot of memories. Before you left Japan
            the fortune teller said you would die
                        a rich old woman.

All poems are copyrighted by Patricia Aya Williams (2025).

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J. Lisa Oyama enjoys gardening, ikebana, volunteering with various API organizations, and dancing when nobody is watching. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband and dog, but will always be a Gardena girl at heart.

Dear Obaachan

I wonder now what I meant to you
This distant little girl an ocean away
Who didn't know that she had your nose
until she was an adult on her honeymoon
And her new husband noticed it right away
While looking at the formal photo of you
Hanging over the doorway of the tatami room
in Uncle Yoshiharu's house 

I hear stories of you now
Told with admiration and some regret
by your daughter
My mother
About how you managed to keep everybody fed during the war
And how she had, in her childish ignorance,
complained that what she really wanted
was to have a bowl of just white rice
not this mixture of grains and filler you had been serving

As an adult, she has imagined the pain and helplessness you must have felt then
and when her little brother, just a toddler at the time, kept saying to you
"Kaji no nai tokoro ni ikou. Kaji no nai tokoro ni ikou."
Begging you to take him to a place where there was no fire
As the bombs fell
And your family gathered their things into a cart
and walked
and walked
and walked
to take shelter with relatives
where there was no guarantee there would be no fire
since there seemed to be no logic to where
the Americans dropped their bombs

I wonder how you felt when your daughter left for America
to marry her high school sweetheart, Kiyoshi
He was a kibei -- one of those Japanese Americans who seemed
more Japanese than American

I know that I lived with you for several months
when I was about three years old
My mother's first trip back to Japan
after being away for six years

I arrived there chattering away in English
and left for America speaking only Japanese

I'm glad I was able to speak to you then
Since my ability to speak Japanese deserted me
Not long after we left you
and went back to California

I'm guessing that our relationship when I was in Japan
was mostly me asking you for help
or for food
or to tell you I was too hot
or to tell you I had yet another mosquito bite
or to ask you what that sound was
as the semi sent out their call
Mi~n mi~n mi~nnnnnn
In the stifling humidity of a Fukuoka summer

The only photo I remember of us together
is of you
carrying me on your back
A blurry photo
and blurry memories

Thank you for carrying me, Obaachan
Okagesamade

Lisa Oyama’s grandparents

*This poem is copyrighted by J. Lisa Oyama (2025)

© 2025 Patricia Aya Williams; J. Lisa Oyama