Fruition

Kelsey Ichikawa

The skin of fruits and vegetables contain the most nutrients

My parents’ words clenched tight between my teeth
As I chew a fibrous, bitter rind
Memories trickling down my lips
The orange’s flesh burns through a window
in the skin my skin I peel off, layer after layer, scraping
epithelium, Butler’s sedimented acts, my name
Wondering, really am I just a pale fungible human peeking from behind
Rawls’ veil of ignorance, or if
underneath you can still discern I am Japanese—American—woman,
Whether the tattoos burnished on my heart are swathed
in citrus juice, visible only to flame held close to its interiors.
What is this stringy white fiber that is so hard to swallow?

The rind slipping in my throat’s depths, history
tangled through black hair no matter how many colors I dye,
painted over my lidless eyes, carving facial curvature.
My bloodstream carries it all:
          empire’s drooling jaws, boats slicing Pacific waters, camp barracks buried in desert
          sand, dutiful wives and dog tags, brother’s heartbeat vibrating on taiko drum skin,
          silicon encrusted American dreams—
Buying into fictions that technoscientific prowess would proximate whiteness
soft and pernicious as the snow that never falls here in the valley.

My ancestors scream with no air
‍it happened before don’t let it repeat     
          Incarceration internment detention prison surveillance cages of suspicion
So here’s to the canaries
replicated across history,
in changing mines always using their last breath to warn against
a system designed to bury us alive.

This satsuma crescent
so shriveled and naked
my tongue darts over my fingers
Juice, pungent as blood, tastes like 日系人 
‍
Nikkei-jin  says everything and nothing
supposed to visibilize the space
between the rising sun and striped stars
But it is a map of miscellany
showing how we got lost but not
how to grow in raw soil
blossom fruit out of our twisted insides
squeeze salves from shame’s ineffable silence 

I swallow the rest of my orange, rind and all
The seeds, they will grow inside me.

__________

Kelsey is a fourth generation Japanese American from California. She graduated from Harvard College in 2020 with an A.B. in Neurobiology and Philosophy.

oceansaway

Mai Kim Nguyen

__________

Mai Kim Nguyễn (she/hers) is from Cambridge, MA and studies at Harvard University with a focus on art, children's learning, and Viet-American identity. Her artistic practice includes: writing, painting, fluting, singing, dancing, jump roping, and daydreaming.

Perpetual Foreigner

Jeanna Shaw

__________

Jeanna is a freshman at the college most likely studying Human Developmental and Regenerative Biology. She is passionate about Asian American advocacy and loves finding ways to integrate advocacy, biology, and other ~quirky~ musings in her art.

Elegy for Korea

Y.A. Suh

‍

after Franny Choi
Make me three kingdoms. Make me
a continent of sires so wide and endless
they ride like stars in expansion,
thunderously back in time. Hooves 
clattering in tandem, metal animals,
great city beasts. What is a horse
if not a vehicle to test its rider, much like
the A-train bucking through Saturday mornings,
gears trembling into slot. Traversing the great
kingdom of transit lines and given enough 
berth even Genghis would’ve thought you
fearsome. You say, They’re afraid.
They tell me to go back
to my empire. He says, Defiance 
is what propelled the horses.

Y.A. Suh is a Korean-American high school senior from New Jersey. You can find her writing in Half Mystic, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and Blue Marble Review, among others.

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