Danger of Drifting
We are willing to be buried.
Devyn Mañibo
Poetry | Poetry Tuesday, poetry
April 2, 2024
April 2, 2024
- At a spa on the southern belly of Japan, my mother and I walk into black sand.
- We are willing to be buried.
- They tell us the sand cures: its properties are charged by the constant potential of Mount Kaimon erupting, just across the bay.
- It’s the first time I have seen her in five years.
- That suits me just fine.
- Chinese women in Japanese yukatas, we enter the grave. Step in! the workers cheer, and we lower into shallow pits. Thank you! they exclaim, and become undertakers. They bury us with precision. Fifteen minutes, okay! I side-eye the scene: heads litter the ground like an aftermath, facing the sea. Everyone is relaxed.
- The ocean is calm.
- A large clock hangs in view.
- You can see every minute on its face, unlike others, which cluster time.
- I am getting used to the sight of my mother’s body in the ground. The longer she lies there, the longer I want her to stay.
- In the locker room, she had touched the slitted scar from which I came. So ugly! she complained, and clapped it under cloth.
- The sand rises, its weight pushes final, and I’m sitting in a panic bath. Not that I’m trapped, but that I might never heal, like I’m supposed to.
- Back in the hotel, I read that Japan was attached to the Eurasian continent. The force of its separation defined its form,
- though what occurs to me now, is that I’ve never been to a funeral.
- When the fifteen minutes are up, my mother begins to hassle me. You can’t go past fifteen minutes, it said so on the sign, it’s the rule. She shakes her yukata and lands rocks in my face. Cancerous, my father watches from the building above.
