I.
We don’t expect Kiyoko to bare
her chest, revealing pale breasts,
small as a young girl’s, nipples blue
and direct. Death clings
to the starchy sheets.
We find her calm, lying
in the twin bed, in the room
with the single window.
She smiles at my husband,
her grandson all grown up.
He used to love how she tore open
her Christmas presents.
Now, she tears at her shirt
and cries, I don’t want to go!

II.
Our girls hover in the corner.
I take them outside to ride scooters,
I can’t stop yelling, Watch out for cars,
driveways, dogs, cracks!, until we find
a cul-de-sac, and they speed in circles,
their feet pushing off concrete
as though it were on fire.

III.
Once, I watched Kiyoko pick blueberries,
lifting the black bird netting to finger the fruit
deftly into her metal bowl with the softest
drum brush sound, dropping one after another
till they spilled on the ground.
We ate them over ice cream
with uncles and cousins,
ate them plain, till our tongues
turned purple. How many thousands
of berries did she pick before
she learned to play their music?

IV.
I hear the violin in the story of how
she met her husband at Minidoka,
the ballfield dances fed with music
and the illusion of freedom.
What is love, when your future burns
just outside a barbed wire fence?
How does a blueberry taste
when you only imagine it?

V.
Sometimes my husband lifts my shirt.
Other times, I lift it for him, place
my breast straight into his warm mouth.
This is what I think of as Kiyoko
claws at her chest—the tender rite
of skin, the ambush of time.