This month, we are so delighted to feature poetry by writer and professor Christine Kitano, with two pieces from her latest chapbook Dumb Luck & other poems (Texas Review Press). Her pieces have us reflecting on the paths of the past that lead us to exactly where we are now, and the things we may hold in our bodies, our memories, despite the passage of time. I am excited that we get to feature Professor Kitano this month and look forward to hosting her in our virtual Nikkei Uncovered reading on August 22. Please save the date now and enjoy some of her work now....

— traci kato-kiriyama

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Christine Kitano is the author of the poetry collections Birds of Paradise (Lynx House Press) and Sky Country (BOA Editions), which won the Central New York Book Award and was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, Dumb Luck & other poems (Texas Review Press) won the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. She is co-editor of They Rise Like a Wave (Blue Oak Press), an anthology of Asian American women and nonbinary poets. She is an associate professor in the Lichtenstein Center at Stony Brook University and also serves on the poetry faculty for the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

The Possum

It was spring, late semester, the California air
thick with jasmine, eucalyptus, a ripe fragrant
heat you could almost see. Nineteen, and though
I didn’t know it then, still in a winter
of mourning, though who doesn’t grieve
at nineteen, after enough of childhood’s petty
injuries, already a lifetime’s worth of disappointments.
And I couldn’t name it then, but it was a breed
of this grief that wrenched me awake each night, my body
a breathless, pure pulse. And so it was, near twenty years ago,
I answered the midnight phone call from a boyfriend,
who was sobbing. “I killed a possum,” he said.
“Will you come see?” Already awake, I agreed.

In his car, I asked what had happened. He said
he had run over a possum on the way back
from McDonald’s, on a side road off Canyon Crest.
He wanted to drive by again, for me to check
if it were really dead, still dead. We drove the mile
or so in silence, and darkness pressed in on all
sides, no visible moon or street lights.
It was somewhere here, he said, slowing the car
to a stop. Can you look, please? I didn’t know
what I was looking for, but I stuck my head
out the window he had already rolled down on my side.
Up ahead, I saw what might be a flash of white,
and said so. That’s it, he said, and inched us closer.
I unbuckled my seat belt, tucked my bare feet under
my knees (the better to lean out), and when I did,
it was as if a curtain rose on cue: the trees parted
and the moon swiveled its spotlight to illuminate
the possum’s smashed face, half-gravel, half-
flesh, one shoe-button eye trained on me, its
triangle mouth agape, as if mid-scream. I screamed too,
and my boyfriend wailed, a pitiful, heartbroken sound
that swelled not empathy but rage, like a fever
through my 100-pound body—the glowing animal’s
broken face just another in a line of petty
disappointments, a face I would have further
broken, smashed, and flung back at the surrounding,
indifferent houses. Instead, I balled a burger wrapper in my fist
and tossed it out the window, said only let’s go.
The boy was crying and I hated him then, such
innocence, such weakness, the otherwise ease
with which I imagined he would navigate
the rest of his simple, milk-sweet life, unable
to own the most minor mistakes.

And me, I carry that possum with me, like the body
of the girl I was, the girl I was leaving behind—
that moonlit face I can still see when I close my eyes.

*“The Possum” was previously published in Hoxie Gorge Review and Dumb Luck & other poems. This poem is copyrighted by Christine Kitano (2024).

To California
         —first line from “To Florida” by Jessica Jacobs

I. Los Angeles, California; 2002

In the citrus light of winter
I walked barefoot on your gray shore,

the wet sand packed hard as concrete—
my footsteps make no imprint.

December, I should be in algebra
but have ditched again to walk

the boardwalk, through a hall
of abandoned carnival games,

plastic bags cinched around the necks
of gruesome-eyed teddy bears, and the roar

of the water I’m sure will one day
swallow my father’s ashes, the house

I live in, my small inheritance dissolving
like a cube of sugar on a hot tongue.

II. Syracuse, New York; 2008

I step into my first winter wearing boots
that trap my ankles like casts, sleep with the sheet

pulled up like a mask to warm the air I breathe.
A spear of ice threatens from the overhang

above our third-story window, hardening,
not sharpening until spring. And still, when I think

of cold, the coldest I’ve ever been, it’s you
I remember, California, fifty-something degrees,

and I’m sixteen, standing barefoot in the December
ocean, palm trees dropping brown fronds

the size of surfboards. My father alive for another
year, though I don’t know this then, though

how did I not know—the water churning
around my ankles turning my body to stone.

III. Ithaca, New York; 2021

In a book I’m reading the author states we each
carry a province within ourselves, a place

we can never leave. California, I never wanted
you because I knew you never wanted me—never

the girl in the postcards, sun ablaze like spun
candy, sugar melting down her golden shoulders. No.

Invisible local, unsmiling daughter of the immigrant,
of the displaced, daughter of the dead and dying, but

where else can I stake my claim? Over a dozen years
gone, now an expert at shoveling snow. A master

of the hunched ice walk. But still surprised
by seasons. Still holding out a gloved palm

for the first snow. And in that province nestled
inside, still sixteen, still

walking that gray beach alone.

*“To California” was previously published in Salt and Dumb Luck & other poems. This poem is copyrighted by Christine Kitano (2024).

© 2024 Christine Kitano