There could not be a more fitting preamble to this entry than the words that accompanied it in an email to me:
“What an impossible, wonderful, challenge this was. I honestly thought I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to submit something for the collection. I sat down at first to write a first hand account of growing up in America as a mixed race person. I tried to capture what it was like to spend a lifetime bubbling in the “Other” option in forms, of becoming a gold medalist at the “but where are you from” Olympics, or of looking “ambiguously ethnic.” My whole life has been a liminal space, neither white or Asian enough, and I tried to force the experience into straight lines.
It was impossible.
Plain words were painful and far too heavy.
Instead, I’ve attached a short poem for consideration. It isn’t the best thing I’ve ever written, and it poured out of me while I sat at my desk, watching the sunlight come in and illuminate the hints of red in my hair. Again, it isn’t the best thing I’ve ever written, but it was the most freeing thing I’ve put to paper.
It felt like breathing.
Sincerely,
Aya Matsumoto”
Some Days
by Aya Matsumoto
Some days
I find myself looking
for the red in my hair.
Gifted from my mother, blue
eyes like the Texas sky.
Most days it’s just brown, brown, brown.
Sometimes like ditchwater
Sometimes like warm summer nights
And good rich earth.
Like hate and love muddied together.
It’s an inherited thing, this brown.
Passed on by my father, green
card in hand and hair Kurosawa dark
Red slinks and hides in sly places,
refusing to sit and be named.
I catch it out of the corner of my eye.
Black is the first thing a person sees, they think
Ah, there is no confusion here.
At first glance I fit the mold they shape for me.
But it’s a trick, a racial sleight of hand.
Their double take puts a question mark where a person stands.
Thornton Sully has Jack-Londoned his way across the globe sleeping with whatever country would have him, and picking up stray stories along the way. A litter of dog-eared passports that have taken up residence in his sock drawer are a constant temptation, but, as the founder in 2009 of A Word with You Press, dedicated to helping you tell your story persuasively and with passion, it’s not likely he will stray too far from the towers that are A Word with You Press, now located in the Bohemian village of Ceske Budejovice in the Czech Republic, except, perhaps, for an occasional swim in the Aegean. Authors who have sought his advice have won major awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Isabel Allende Miraposa Award for new fiction, and the Best Poetry Award from San Diego Writers’ Awards.
“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” Thornton Sully, plagiarizing E.B. White
Beautiful, Aya! You are perfect!
Love you,
E.