Jennifer Hasegawa
To Anyone Who Can’t Get Home
(Including Natives, Immigrants, and Extraterrestrials)
The false harbor of home:
washed ashore and alien
again.
This belongs to you.
It does not belong to me.
Before the steamship
that delivered great-grandfather.
Before: the brigantine
that brought coffee and the first Bible.
Before the double-hulled canoe
that arrived to find it was not the first.
Slice the water:
the instinct to take up space.
Trace the trajectory:
the instinct to connect points.
From Hawaiki,
the place from which we came
and the place we will call home
when we die—back to Babylon,
where there was a tower built
by people speaking a common language.
From the urge to remember
and be remembered—
the confundation of language and meaning:
agents of the first
and eternal voyage away.
Previously printed in Standing Strong! Fillmore & Japantown: Voices from Write Now! Fillmore and Write Now! Japantown, Pease Press, 2016.
In darkness,
we pluck the gourd
from which we fling
pulp and seeds into light.
From the bloody mouth
and the destroyer,
we pluck
calamondin thimbleberry mountain apple
and delight
when we mistake the red fur of the tree fern
for a wild boar.
Every birth
is an act of colonization:
mongoose
born to mouse
born to grain.
In defense, we leave places
in exactness:
a typewriter on a desk,
chicken bones in a sink,
an empty bottle of perfume
on a nightstand.
But return
and return again
to these places
only to find ghosts
clicking keys,
touching bones,
and inhaling the last traces
of home.
Reflection Questions:
How does this poem transform "alien" to universal?
What can "return" look like for natives and immigrants?
What defines home in this poem, and for you?
Jennifer Hasegawa is the author of NAOMIE ANOMIE: A Biography of Infinite Desire and La Chica's Field Guide to Banzai Living (Omnidawn), which won the Joseph Henry Jackson Award and was longlisted for The Believer Book Award in Poetry. A poet and technologist, she serves on the board of Marigold Project: Day of the Dead SF and founded Kau Kau Chronicles, which preserves and shares the history of Hawaiʻi's recipes — work that bridges poetry, cultural memory, and the poetics of place.