May 27, 2019

Dear Brandon, 

Yesterday, blackbirds rose from the high brush near the stone memorial in Poston while my father flung his arms out, marveling and smiling in the sweet unseasonal winds. A half-moon hung above the circle of palm trees in the morning light. Weathered folded cranes lay slumped at the base of the memory marker. 

Is it too soon to be writing this? Is it too late—

You once told me about the prisoners in the Department of Justice camp at Fort Missoula collecting stones and speculating on the ancient rivers and seas that had made them. Driving with my father from California via Joshua Tree and on to Parker, I felt the smallness of the human project against primordial ridge lines and desert sea-floor. I felt the seabed and the wild sea.

Now I hear my father coughing in the next room in a stranger’s house in the warm hour of Phoenix, having visited two concentration camps this week and communed. Having driven together in my tiny car up rock-strewn acres to the bright stone monument with our two guides from the Gila River Indian Community. Under the high, white afternoon, over the olive trees and mesquite, we felt the bodies of our elders blooming in the steady heat—rising up, rising, and rising. 

Brandon, maybe we are who we remember ourselves to be. Our dignified lives, an act of resistance. Our survival, a rebellion. “Our ancestors were here together,” said our guides—“stolen bodies on stolen lands”—so we stood in a circle and the wind stood with us and the memories made us stronger: tractor rides and bartered pomegranates; koi ponds, talent shows, night shootings, urns.

Dear Brandon, Nikiko, Mia, Todd; Dear Brian, Patricia, Koji, Sean—

Didn’t we dance? Didn’t we rise from July’s belly—Bon Odori—moving to Taiko stomps in the circle of families, learning the shapes of honor early on? We were site-specific and dangerous in our pleasure. We were talk-story breathless-laughter and ancestral rage.

Now I hear violins singing in the barrack bones, 80 years on. Creosote overtakes the old foundations, its healing spines break concrete. “Is it possible to send promises backwards?” 

Tell me, Brandon, what do you think?

With love,

Brynn

Read Brandon Shimoda’s reply.