Where We Grew Up
Where we grew up, our mother’s half moon eyes and laughter disappeared in the scissors of the mountains. We mapped her happiness to our father, but directions are just hand-me-downs of where someone’s already been.
Where we grew up, they blanketed the lake with a golf course. Blue were our mother’s eyes when our father’s affair surfaced. Fish pimpled the banks, and no one could get clean of the mystery drive-bys late at night. A marriage is only measured by the width of its division.
We learned to hold our breath, waiting for something louder than silence.
Babaa, war-prepped and hungry, feeds then shushes us, so we can hear our mother’s cries behind the door. Our mother’s heart is an inaccurate machine gun. We want to fix her aim. After three nights, Babaa knives the belly of the door. We hoped it was fatherless, like us, and left behind. After the grand opening, we didn’t need directions to the not-there lake, to the not-there family in the gold-framed photo.
The Body Remembers
Okinawan women supposedly have more booty than Japanese women, but what do I know?
Maybe they meant hips. Bowls for offspring, unwanted hands, a pit stop. Our hips are slick with inheritance, ripe with refusal. A list poem builds its weight with steady repetition. The body remembers closing its eyes. The body remembers closing. The body remembers—
Salt-tongue on collarbone, the ache between hips where language failed me. I’m trying not to write a poem about victimization, but this morning the rain mounted blades of grass and I wondered what closure felt like. Children were once forced to wear a lei of shame over their chest: “I used the (Okinawan) dialect.” Erasure stretches over generations, but shame remains an open season.
Now I wear the pua on my thighs, let my lovers say my name in any dialect. They say pelagic fish, like ahi or marlin, need constant flow to breathe; pulled from water, they suffocate mid-air. Pelagic means needy. But my mother’s Oknawan voice breathes freely in my head—no need for water, no fear of drowning.
Shareen K. Murayama is the author of three poetry books Housebreak (Bad Betty Press, 2022) and Girl, Are You in the Experimental Group (Harbor Editions, 2022), and The Mother Who Couldn’t Describe a Thing if She Could (Harbor Editions, 2024). She’s a Japanese American, Okinawan American poet and educator, and a 2023 Jack Hazard Fellow. She lives in Honolulu and supports the #litcommunity @AmBusyPoeming.
January House Literary Journal 
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