POETRY:: Jill Yamasawa

How to Drink Water

Do you remember
drinking bottled water,
seriously,
drinking tap bottled water,
before the Gulf War?

Sometimes poor planning causes
overflows in landfills,
and sometimes miscalculating
how long a desert war
will last creates
a need
for a new marketing
campaign.   

Anderson Cooper, on Anderson Cooper

I had a friend make
a fake press pass
on a Macintosh,
and I snuck into Burma
and hooked up with students
fighting the Burmese government.

I found my way
to this town
that was like a Wild
West border town
and contacted this person
who my connection
in New York told me of, and
said I was a reporter.

We met
in an ice cream parlor,
and they agreed
to take me in,
and they smuggled
me across the border into Burma.

Tests and Fireworks, June 4, 2008

This city heat is an octopus
devouring its prey.
Our memories fuzz and pill
during these vog days. 
We are bursting
with thoughtlessness;
concerns become balloons
deflating in a back closet.

In the middle of this masculine,
idolized heat, our walls tremble
from explosions past
the Ala Wai, above Waikīkī. 

We brace for the screams of terror
instead the shrieks are full
of shock and awe
at glittering patterns sustained
in a darkening sky.

Somehow we’d expected
other explosions
like the ones that occur
twelve miles above the Ocean
like the one planned for tomorrow,
which will be one of many
tests off Kauaʻi.

Dad, on Honaunau Grandpa

Dad sits on our unpainted stairs where
the railings are rotting. 
This evening he wears jeans without holes,
has bothered to tuck in a dark shirt and
on his farmer’s waist, buckled an old belt.

“He didn’t have music,” he says finally
after many minutes of silence,
“in the Hawaiian he spoke.”
He pauses again, brushes something invisible
off his forearm, “It’s because he wasn’t
a full on native

speaker. His friend told me,
the one who knew
the language the best in Honaunau,
his friend, he said,
that Grandpa, he didn’t have
that rhythm, that flow that makes
the language musical,
but that he was well understood.”