Lana Reeves

My Mom Had to Teach Me Real Pearls Are Gritty in the Mouth

for 恵美⼦

My grandmother, calf-legged in a kimono the color of her monthly blood,

given up, or whisked away. Depending who you ask. Child

for the starched-white sheets of a businessman. Gotten out,

is how she tells it now, after decades of trying to put to bed her life.

At her vanity, I fix the stiff clasps of her big-beaded necklaces

so they clink atop the cream-ironed letters of my abercrombie tee

as she watches from behind, eyes steady as two black pebbles

in the lake of the mirror. A favorite pastime of ours. I flex the yet-to-open

buds of my chest while she imagines what she’ll leave behind. Gold. Gold

with globes of milk or murky amber, strung cylinders of sun-blown birth-rite

topaz, cubes of turquoise incandescence, so light the light passes through.

Heavy, too, tiny orbits of dense, accumulated mass of the unsayables

nesting above my heart. It’s all plastic, I’ll later learn,

though I don’t know that now. For now, what’s lackluster and starred

burst their foreign-sounding names on my tongue like fizzing candy.

Or like a fuse. Gotten out, she says, because B-52s

bombed the village in which she was born. The spheres fell gently

and numerous like many bleached suns. Even when she conjures

that iron insect of war, bii fifu-tee-chuu, my gaze tills and tills her lips

as I crush the pearl of word to my two front teeth. Bii fifu-tee-chuu.

Bii fifu-tee-chuu. Belief, chewed, stains our tongues like abalone.

Issue 117