Sloan Asakura

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War in the Window

Anaphora, haunted by itself. Anaphora, remembering itself. A dream of itself. Anaphora, collapsing time and memory. Anaphora holding itself. Cradling. Anaphora, mirror images facing each other. How far can we travel before we arrive where we must? Do we? 

What is it? What are we doing, here in poetry, talking ourselves into spirals, eating the same phrase over and over? Is it insatiety? Is it an act of conjuring? 

It takes five generations for the atom bomb to clear its stamp from the genetic code. This means we have still not seen a generation unmarked by the bomb. It stutters its scream between cells in a child’s body somewhere off the harbor where oyster shells stain the flickering water with iridescent glows, bones still stuck between them. And while the mutation may subside, the cell still remembers. Do you remember? 

Anaphora reaches across a page to touch itself yet never touches its original form because it is never new again once born. 

We are approaching a generation unmarked by the atom bomb. Every baby, new, where one bears them. Today, a mother is pregnant with a new baby. Today, the baby is forming all its fingers and brain matter. Today, the cells cannot remember why they are violent but keep fighting one another. Today, a mother hopes she can be good to her child, that the world will be good to them too. Today, she lights incense at the altar. Today, she avoids eating raw fish so as to not poison her child. Today, the world sighs—all her efforts made obsolete by a bomb dropped somewhere in Iran on top of a girls’ school. 

No child is safe so long as any are unsafe. Was there ever a time when a child was safe? Is this violence anaphora? 

There’s a trail to follow back. Back in time. Back to the beginning, if there was one. Or perhaps we might call it the traceable beginning, which is perhaps as miniscule as an atom splitting, or perhaps even smaller than that. 

Anaphora means to carry or bear, as in a child, back, as in back in time or place. Let us go there, to the origin, which is nowhere and somewhere all at once.

There are theories about the Big Bang and theories about a man who named himself God. 

There are theories about dust and a woman molded from a bone 

There are theories about an inhale and a sigh, and there are theories about lichen 

There are theories about whales and why they have knees 

There are theories about webbed toes 

There are theories about gods who destroyed the world four times and tried to make man every time but killed man every time and some of the leftover spirits still live in the space between your teeth and the trees growing over your lungs 

There are theories about water coming from a comet which slammed into our planet from some launch out from the Kuiper Belt 

There are theories about the drum 

There are theories about Venus, what might have killed her 

There are theories about girls 

There are theories about the moon and when it joined our orbit, where it came from, if anywhere 

There are theories about black holes 

There are theories about planets not connected to stars or solar systems 

There are theories about light 

There are theories about shadows and psychology 

There are theories about dogs and how they came to love us 

There are theories about the first dog buried with adornments 

There are theories about summer 

There are theories about how many times we die before we get here 

There are theories about love 

There are theories about what lives at the deepest ends of our planet and why we’ll never know it 

There are theories about Saturn’s rings 

There are theories about shape 

There are theories about the bomb, of which still we’re watching the horrors unfold 

There are theories about the ginkgo that lived 

There are theories about the ground and how often to touch it 

There are theories about time and positionality in space 

There are theories about movement 

There are theories about mushrooms 

There are theories about the genome’s memory 

There are theories about monogamy 

There are theories about last love 

There are theories about linguistic return 

There are theories about the psychology of empire 

There are theories about oil and starvation and cobalt 

There are theories about the weather and the warplane

There are theories about the DSM-5 and the medicalization of mental health in America 

There are theories about girls 

There are theories about the afterlife 

There are theories about the minutes before the afterlife 

There are theories about the seconds before the afterlife 

There are theories about seconds 

There are theories about counting the seconds 

There are theories about the psychology of architecture 

There are theories about artisanship 

There are theories about creation

oh look here we are again 
          talking about the beginning 

There are theories about poetry

I’m about to give you another one 
right here, at the beginning 
          or the traceable beginning 
                    which is now 
                    which is all we have

and what of the music of all this? 
i’m not concerned. 
it persists despite the silence we push upon it 
there are places in mexico where white americans move just to file noise complaints and the
community comes out with all their mariachis and boom boxes and laughter too thunderous 
all teeth and summer 
the silence 
helpless to stop it 


and las monarcas sound like clattering marbles 
their million wing beats shatter out from trees 
where you cannot tell their sunset hearts from leaves 
and all the people quiet like people 
and the quiet quiets all the quiet 
to hear the wind 
applauding another migration 
another spring to lose them 
another fall to welcome them home
how long does one survive oneself? 
anaphora will tell you  

so long as someone wills for music 
          which is to say 
          there is no other option

anaphora is war. 
anaphora is resistance.

when the soldiers came home, they made their beds. tucked their sheets tightly, folded their clothes squarely, and wept in their sleep, just as they had for the months and years prior. when the children grew up, they hid in their skin, kept their birth certificate in a backpack by the door, drew the face of their mother and her one gold tooth they could identify her by on repeat. when the bomb dropped in hiroshima, it never stopped dropping because america never stopped dropping it and when will we stop using words like “dropped” and “fell” to describe the american method of bombing, as if by accident, as if inconsequential? when the bomb ate hiroshima, it never stopped—insatiable, this empire, insatiable, this body, which is us, which is america, which is war.

and anaphora, its little blue knuckle, bruise to bruise in fist to fist. i’m not about to pretend a poem can stop a war. but people can, i hope, and i write because of the distance i want to close between myself and you. 

anaphora is war. 
anaphora is resistance. 

cyclical and directional, anaphora returns to itself by moving itself forward and back at once. anaphora denies the page its rules, denies western prescriptive rules of grammar and redundancy, denies scarcity while perpetuating a scarcity of language, indulges itself by way of itself, collapses time and texture forcing the slow down and the pause and demands attention. anaphora carries its hammer into the crowd and blooms the space around it. anaphora is a violence that resists violence by insisting it be seen for what it is. it is a confrontation and a ceremony. 

the paradoxical nature of anaphora is perhaps a poetic embodiment of C-PTSD, a common diagnosis for victims of war. C-PTSD occurs because of repetitive trauma. C-PTSD develops into differing expressions of fear that insist upon return. emotional flashbacks. nightmares. chronic avoidance. hyper-vigilance. physical illness manifesting after a trigger. insomnia. emotional dysregulation. the laundry list is long. the prognosis is a lifetime. 

there is no solution but to know your patterns intimately and to work at changing them so as to not repeat the harm. C-PTSD develops because the body wants to survive but cannot bear to survive itself. people with C-PTSD are more likely to develop cancer, another kind of repetition. a repetition of mutation. a repetition of cells poisoning cells. a choir in discord. C-PTSD is treated with EMDR, rapid eye movement bringing your eyes in a constant state of return while you relive and rewrite your most painful memories continuously. one must return to the beginning, if there ever was one. one must refuse to close. 

i am not a war victim. i have never been bombed. i inherited the bomb. i inherited the war. i inherited the barbed wire, the shape of its mouth around the bodies of my family in tulare, where my grandfather’s brother threw his marble shooter out the door of their horse stall, where my grandfather reached a palm out the door, where the soldier in the watchtower trained a gun on the palm. my grandfather was nine. 

i am not a war victim. i am an american, therefore, an agent of war no matter how unwilling. concentration camps turn into concentration camps. my ancestors take the shape of my neighbors being marched off in the night. i am not a war victim. i am an american, therefore, constantly in a state of war. unable to depart myself. a violence that never closes. 

i am not a war victim. i am a victim of a different violence, which is the violence of being a girl once. i inherited the violence my mother inherited. my mother had a child and hoped to protect her, just as every mother. we could not protect each other from what the world would do. a mother somewhere in iran with a hole in her life shaped like her daughter. this image repeating 175 times. this is anaphora. 

anaphora is war. 
anaphora is resistance. 

anaphora is an incantation. anaphora invokes the dead. anaphora sings itself alive. anaphora refuses closure. anaphora mimics war by its refusal to end. anaphora mimics healing by its refusal to end. anaphora is a door behind a door. anaphora is the spell which darkens the palm. anaphora refuses silence. anaphora is music, which is always resistance. 

i do not believe a poem can stop a war. i do not believe a poem can hold a war. i believe in the limits of language as much as i believe in its boundlessness. when comes the song that lives in my mouth, so too lives the quiet. anaphora takes the place of the words i might have had to describe the overwhelm i feel if the overwhelm was not so overwhelming. when first i heard the story of the atom bomb, it was about a child who wanted to live but couldn’t, it was about a cancer conceived through pikadon, it was about the gingko tree still growing, it was my father telling me about the oyster shells shining in the harbor. 

it was believed you could cure pikadon by making tea from the ashes of those who died from the bomb. it was believed you could cure pikadon by eating the oysters from the harbor where the bodies were swept to from the river the survivors attempted to drink from when they were burnt from the inside out and died after drinking water because of the nature of interior wounds and bacteria. it was believed the land could not grow vegetation for 70 years. there were theories about the long term effects of the atom bomb. there are theories still.

i do not believe a poem can stop a war. i do believe a poem can hold an experience of war. i do believe a poem can connect one body to another despite the war in between. 

in minneapolis, there are children being taken from their parents to be held in the same concentration camps my family was interned in in 1942. this is anaphora. cyclical and directional. the mouth of america always in the same shape and action, which is to consume, which is to chew, which is to swallow all the little bones that are yours and not yours. 

in minneapolis, there are people defending their neighbors and dying for it on repeat. this is anaphora. cyclical and directional. the mouth of love, always in the same shape and action, which is to hold, which is to bear, which is to swallow all the little joys that are yours and not yours. 

i do not believe a poem can stop a war. 

on a train to baltimore, i passed through new york city. it was cloudy, and the sun was setting but the nature of the weather made this knowledge a silent one. the dense fabric of cloud cover lay behind the skyline. the clouds began to part their lips to whisper, and through the mouth, suddenly the secret sun—its red breath bisecting a  skyscraper in a kiss against its neck. and all the world quieted briefly, and even music felt to pause. and for the first time, perhaps, i felt this was not anaphora. but my love was. 

i want to believe a poem can stop a war. 
i want to believe love can stop a war. 
i want to believe war stops. 
that violence is a temporary condition. 
but i know what made me and what i became 

          accustomed to the tradition of my knuckles and teeth. 
          the distance between my father and i once stretched 
          the length of the whole west coast 
          all the blood staining the land in between. 
          when my father told me about the oyster shells 
          he was drunk, arms folded guarding his heart 
          there were tears in his eyes which he wiped with his crooked fingers 
          and all the violence of memory was just a breath 
          and i knew i loved my father.

it takes five generations for the atom bomb to clear its stamp from the body. 
it takes fourteen generations for epigenetic markers of trauma to leave a bloodline. 
i wrote, every bomb after the atom bomb is still the atom bomb. 
there is no such thing as a generation unmarked by the atom bomb.
no child is safe so long as any aren’t. 

i want to believe war stops. i want to believe love doesn’t.

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Banner Art:
Rene Magritte, The Battle of the Argonne, 1959, WikiArt