Category: Sakura (Issue No. XVIII)

Mother, Sister, Daughter, Sakura

Vikki C.

This world is wounding itself. I walk through the conflict, avoiding the churches, the in-laws and all acts of confession. My lithe body, barely a nightdress, floating south and south again, until I reach my youth. Quiet feet wading through the boulevard of pink cherry blossoms from another heaven. 

Dad leaves the petals unswept over the lawn, to hide the unkempt yellow grass from Mum, or to mask the scars in advance. The driveway is blanketed too, and the car is still covered with the darker pink petals from the hospice visit. We let them be.

Ordinary men say famous artists only paint almond blossoms as a distraction from the asylum. That if we fill our eyes with portraits of spring and promise, bright buds on blue, we would be cured for a little while, enough time to find the exit. That insanity would not encroach with its heavy black bough, latching the door from the inside out. 

But now it’s 2023, and I’m at Kensington cemetery paying respects to the latest victims of tragedy. The cherry trees are weeping heavily over the wet lichened graves, mourning about me leaving too early that one winter Sunday, naively hurrying to a lover in my next life. Your pale face at the small window washed in evening light, as if watching from the other side – seeing the divorce and all the babies swept away to far-off territories. Unreachable. 

Occasionally, they call home, pretending to keep me alive. They’re a hardy species known to weather the harsh winters in places cut off by cold wars. Bombs, crisis, severance. The signal is lost after a minute, but I know they remember the womb like a safe haven.

Still, there are brave men who carry injured women like me to safety, comforting us with white lies: dusting the shrapnel from our hair, brushing it off as just sakura. They tell us that the flowerless vase in the hallway is shattered – but maybe the house can be salvaged. 

That there are girls with minds like mine. Daughters who are fragile blooms, caught in the middle of battlefields. And as much as they belong with us, we can never carry them home safely, without the petals coming apart in our hands.

Vikki C.

Sublet

Emily Kedar

I come back
to find my grandmother’s
pink geraniums dead. The only
living being
that knew us both
and had no tongue to lie.

I drag my finger
across the glass face
of the coffee table. My thumbprint
warped and elongated, presses
down into dust. 

I rearrange the stones
I’d left on the window sill
back the way they were.
The coffee grinder’s bust, so 

I head out
into the light snow
of morning, my feet landing
step after step
in someone else’s footprints.

Emily Kedar

for Now

Tylyn K. Johnson

let this momentary experience be
for us, to turn ourselves
into a messy painting
on your wall, made of
our skin and flesh and
sweat and laughter

Tylyn K. Johnson

At the Edge of Hope

Kersten Christianson

I want to pen a note about spring.
Not the dead alder, rain after rain after
rain despair of it, but the rose
gold sheen of storm having passed,
dissipating at the knife-sharp edge of outer coast
where blue herons and mallards frequent
the estuary’s ebb and flow.

I want the medicine of tender greens
the tangle of blooming branch,
squall of cherry blossoms adrift

under patches of blue-sky canopy
with supple heart and thoughts of you,
I want the spring that snaps winter’s back.

Kersten Christianson

Final Measure

Ellen Malphrus

Ellen Malphrus