Sutured Memori
by Michelle Naka Pierce
Aunt Ritsuko, black and white photograph. Courtesy of the author from the Pierce/Masuda family archive.
Sutured Memorī
MICHELLE NAKA PIERCE | SEPT 2023 | Issue 27
In this wedding day photo, you see Mama in Ritsuko Obasan’s face. You are told she is the pretty one. Or the smart one. Or the feisty one. Unreliable memory. Sisters five. Surely, there are many ones. In front of her womb, her fist pulls the fabric of the kimono tight—gutto gaman / a symbol of endurance. Perhaps a gesture of strength against the future growth. At four, you travel with Mama to Japan as your aunt lies dying. A flower’s ovary matures into a fruit. Hers divide into abnormal cells with swollen veins like the legs of a crab. You, too, will have enlarged bilateral veins that outsmart the embolization. You do not mean to compare your plight with her loss of life. They say fibroids and cancer are hereditary. The surgeon “favors removing ovaries given the risk of sampling error on uterine masses at time of frozen.” You wonder about her pain. Hope there are moments of ease in the midst of unbearable suffering. Very little of this trip is remembered. Except when you return to the States, you speak only Japanese / forget all your English. You ask your brother’s friend, who teases, if he wants a hana pachanko / a punch in the nose / as you waive your tiny clenched hand. If we were lilies, petals would guard our base / stalk / bulb. But we are Masuda women / resilient in our gaman.
Michelle Naka Pierce is daughter of Sensei Michiko Masuda Pierce, partner to poet Chris Pusateri, human healing from surgery, poet embodying her future book, professor in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, and author of nine titles, including four full-length works: TRI/VIA with Veronica Corpuz; Beloved Integer; She, A Blueprint with art by Sue Hammond West; and Continuous Frieze Bordering Red, awarded Fordham University’s Poets Out Loud Editor’s Prize. Pierce is currently working on Sutured Memorī, which documents the enduring caregiving to a nonagenarian Mother in cognitive decline as well as The Body’s surgical trauma and its aftermath / a recovery project that leans into the Zuihitsu tradition of “following the brush”—stitching together memory, the body, dreamscape, evocation as well as the grief in losing both womb and Mother simultaneously.