Food and Beverage: Two Poems by Jessica Kashiwabara
Mochi in the Moon
From Earth, my grandmother in the night sky
telling me the story of the rabbit
in the moon. Arched ears on a proud profile,
dark against the shine of this bright, full orb.
Look. Deep craters form a face: they’re called maria.
Latin for seas. Seventeenth-century
stargazers saw the push & pull of tides
pooled in basaltic plains formed by colliding
asteroids—cosmic fire & dust
marking their path. Celestial damaged
beauty keeping time through cycles & cycles.
How does the story go again?
The rabbit in the moon pounds mochi
my grandmother whispers from the heavens.
Resurrection
I resurrected your garden in the backyard,
Oba-chan, tilled the soil with the same tools
Oji-chan made with his hands. Careful
to protect my soft palms from the splintering
wood of the handle. The sickle carves
a path for the tender seedlings, the soil
still rich from all your work accepting new roots
after years of dry neglect. Seeing the first
cucumber born from a bright yellow flower,
the tomato vines splintering this way
and that until the whole garden is filled
with their plump red fruit.
I pick the cucumber and make sunomono,
the smell of fresh ground sesame seeds fills
the room, add wakame for a taste of the ocean
and a squeeze of lemon, just the way you taught me.
The sweet juices blend through my fingers,
the perfect summer dish of sweet tart salt.
The nasubi doesn’t grow properly, their purple stems
only produce dry misshapen bodies. But I have
time to learn. There is next season and the next.
Understanding something I hadn’t when you were alive.
About Jessica Kashiwabara
Jessica Kashiwabara is a writer and editor from Southern California. Her essays and poems have appeared in Black Renaissance Noire, Midwestern Gothic, PANK, Tribes, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. She was an invited writer for Building Empathy, a community-based education project in the Pasadena Unified School District focused on the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and contemporary civil rights struggles. She is currently at work on a collection of essays.
Photo Credit: Richard Louissaint
