They had her in the radiation ward of a large ramshackle hospital
in Hiroshima for second-generation bomb victims
the bomb having been not just nuclear warfare but biological
She had plastic curtains so we wouldn’t breath on her
her immune system was shot all to hell
but she opened the curtains for Rube and me
We’d bought a six-pack of beer and carried it in
drank the beer and lined the cans up one by one on the window sill
“How’s it gonna hurt anything?” he asked me. “They already been bombed.”
Katsuko’s grand-mom had been a strong-minded woman
took three lovers and left each for as good a reason as she took him
she ground pharmaceuticals with a mortar and pestle
for her husband the village doctor
He’d built the Yoshijima house where Katsuko grew up
bringing the timber down from the mountains to build it strong
It’s a country house, the only one of its kind left in Hiroshima
Recent additions like the modern toilet outside were afterclaps
the old folks couldn’t accept the idea of a toilet indoors
The family name was Tokimori, Edo Era time keepers.
K was born August 9, three days after the blast.Her mother turned her back to it
and fell, doubling her body to protect the child in her womb
Three days later, unaided, her back a mass of burn tissue, she gave birth.
The child grew up skin-to-skin with her mother, the keloid scars just mother flesh
K swam in the clear stream of the Motoyasu River
gathered shellfish in a bucket she took home to her mother
who put them in saltwater overnight so they’d open and expel the sand
then she’d use them in misoshiru. Each time K gave birth
the’d slit the lower labia to give the child room for the womb to expel it
then sewed it back up. When the babies had bad colds
she'd sucked the snot from their noses so they could breathe.
Sex with hubby stopped eight years ago, with her youngest’s birth.
She'd wanted cunnilingus and he acted insulted.
Time went by till they screwed again and still he wouldn't kiss her there,
At last K asked him, "mada?" That was it, the end of marital sex
A few years later she began an affair with a local socialist politician
She worked for his campaigns and slept with him once a month.
Her breasts had lost their peachiness, but he told her she was his favorite 40-year-old.
She liked him but not the competition with all his younger women
so she withdrew for as good a reason as she’d begun. That was three years ago.
She still sleeps with her daughter, she told me.
They sleep side by side, holding hands or just touching.
Kana cuddles Chappi when she goes to sleep
but during the night she tosses him aside
He's dark and worn, has no eyes or features just a black bearish shape
Kana, watching her cut her hair, had asked, "Mama, do you have a broken heart?"
"No," she'd replied, "but at my age it wouldn't be odd. Why do you ask such things?"
Kana is ten years old. Growing up, says her mother.
She’s noticed that the odor (おりもの) in Kana's pants is the same as hers.
That shows the strength of heredity, she said
giving me a glimpse into the world of mother-daughter-ness.
Today K’s head is shaven like a nun’s and she wears a knit skull cap
She has her Buddhist sutras beside her at last
A few years ago she told me, “being healthy I don’t think about religion.
When I get sick and am facing death, then I’ll study the sutras.”
She didn’t need sutras. Smiling in death’s bad breath
as a time being she was already enlightened
she just didn’t know it. Now she was out of it.
