observing obon

the museums close early today.
instead of chrysanthemums for our unburied,
we invite them to a feast of light.
let the smoke sing of a past
we are too busy living to mourn.
let the night be a vessel for our hunger
for beauty, endless and swift.
look: a ring of stars rounds
our little lives, the sound of rain
falling late on our ears, each burst taking
flight, fireworks like supernovae like rice
sized shrapnel cradled by my grandmother’s war-worn hands.
in the water below, the world cups brightness
like a weeping willow, limbs laden
with leaving. in today’s collective dream,
we are knowable even without our dead.
tonight, our empty graves are lightened of their loads, the sky
forgetting its crime of cloud-clotted lineage,
wayward sparks scabbing into
morning. in the face of all this
gunpowder, these imagined ghosts around the dinner table,
it is impossible not to believe
in our alternate histories, which is probably
what our ancestors thought when the shells
meant beauty and then bombs and then
beauty, unthinkable and alive.
when the abundance smears into smoke,
we will hate the sight of our hands
and what they’ve done to these pages.
we wear our old names into the new year like blood.

Read more from Issue No. 33 or share on Twitter.