Origami History (or Folded Tongues) (3/30)

My last name is an origami crane

and American tongues can’t fold

into those sounds, so I’ve given

up on caring when people shred

the syllables of my name into

confetti, to celebrate ‘murica

because Yasuoka, You-sucka,

Yuh-soka, Yuh-soko

Yaki-soba, Yasuaka, Ya-so-k

It’s all the same in my melting

pot ears. And there are more

important shredders to be

worried about. My grandfather

was three years old those paper

planes flew over his birthday party

on their way to unfold battle ships

he was never in an internment camp

but he told me he remembered

visiting one. Yet, my AP US

History textbook lies, Everystate

except for Hawaii hadinternment camps

This is not true. Hawaii had internment

camps they were just crumpled up

and forgotten under the weeds of time

and all that’s left of and my textbook

folds fifty states of suffering into a single

sentence. They took people with origami

names like mine and folded them into

horse stables, surrounded by barbed

wire that metal origami. Today, we have

crumpled them up and tossed them into

the waste basket of history along with

the rest of the Japanese suffering.

I am sitting on my uncle John’s porch

and his mother tells me about growing

up in Japan during the war, she was

in high school when it looked like America

would invade the teacher led her class

into the forest, they had no lead, so they

told them to turn bamboo into spears

and that they were expected to tear

one American soldier from the history

books, before their bodies folded into

corpses. Their homes were made of rice paper

so when we firebombed Japan

Tokyo looked like a lantern.

You see, war always starts with the paper

work, paper bullets, propaganda, passports,

draft cards, lists of names. We are paperwork

Human beings are origami cranes trying

to fold ourselves a thousand times

so that our wishes can come true

but the scissors of war cut us into snowflakes

and our tongues still can’t fold themselves

into our neighbors names so they learn

to tear their syllables apart. I don’t care

when people mispronounce my name

what I do care about, is how our tongues

refuse to speak about those camps.

How the onion is the only place to cover

the anniversary and Manzanar is folded

into nature photographs. Our tongues

are scissors. Silence is a string.

My grandmother is too young to remember

the day the war started, at six month old

if I have a grandson. The silence may be too

old for him too remember.