The Vice Principle Wrote “Unofficially, good luck.”
Poetry
My fingertips feel the cardstock cover, oil-smooth from handling, of this ghost collection, Post-Ano 1945 a yearbook from the Poston internment camp high school. Even in incarceration, these Americans canonized clowns and class, chronicled fashions and attempts to make hair defy gravity with pin and barrel curls.
The White in me wants to know history, my history, but only until it stops being clean. Then, I will chop it up and fragment it to protect me from the parts that don’t add up. American colonialism in the Pacific is a typhoon where the rain and the wind floods, but not all things are touched, not all things are washed. Miracles and curses differ only in damage.
In this yearbook, sometimes, but not many, in the portrait grid or club photos, a body is missing, in its place, just a name and empty square or an alphabetical gap in the row of faces. The owner of the yearbook drew slanty-eyed, buck-toothed caricatures to replace the portraits and labeled faceless stick figures in the group shots
as if internment’s twin sibling is internalization with a baby coming, called “Loss.”