Two Poems

FEAST

At night I eat a garden, though I keep this from my sister. She wants more
from the remnants: to bloom sweet green scraps, bok choy from chopped heads
ghosts rooting climbing down through clear glass, curling in and in, carrots bobs
no bodies but green froth good for pesto,
cabbage a crown of new life and scallions
folding themselves up from the insides, wet and thinly slimed
all rims, a course of hair uncouth at the base. Her hands retain
the wax of leaves, dirt at the nail and
signs of scrubbing like when
she was new to me. Hello
she says to spinach buds reborn, the tempo of greeting
unfurling now – knowing
as I know, her patience is cut
with a quick and verdant anger
a slit tonged wrath at racists, the nosy, the rude
that I covet
and admire – knowing greenly
of my midnight feast, how wants in this time
are fecund, allow some meetings and not others.

_________

Emily Mitamura is a queer Japanese American poet and PhD student living in Minnesota. Her academic work takes up afterlives of colonial and mass violence, in particular the narrative demands placed on those in its wakes. Her poetry works through continuous bodily, relational, archival  hauntings and appears in AAWW: The Margins, Discover Nikkei, AADOREE, and Clarion Magazine among other places. You can find her at http://emilymitamura.com or at Magers & Quinn booksellers’ $1 section.