From BAMBOO RIDGE Issue Number Three, June – August 1979, Full Moon

Inheritance
           by wanda fujimoto

my grandmother died
                                         before I had a face
she reclaims me now with silence
                         and a brown photograph:
                                 her kimono, hair, face,
                                 the instep of her turned-in foot

I have no stock in this place
the woman in the picture is
                                         the sole estate of my inheritance
her immigrant's name and face,
                         her incomplete passage

blood
there are no islands in its red surge
where the ground wires should be
             is only a space the color of sleep
if you look long enough into my left eye
       you will see my grandmother there
sitting with tabied feet
                             and hands of silence
sitting in constant passage

* * * * *

Bio: wanda fujimoto said she knew “nothing about fishing and [was] all 'chicken skin' to have been included in a magazine edited by experts in the field.” She mentioned that she'd “recently ended voluntary imprisonment at the U.H.” and hoped “to flee to Europe in August with her M.A. in English as a Second Language before the wardens discover[ed] her escape.”

This was wanda's first publication — “Not counting the Junior Star Bulletin when she was five.” Eric and Darrell said back then, “When you leave her poems, lines linger in your mind.”