Sisters of The Ancestral Fog

I am thanking my father for the memory,

I am asking my mother to turn it into a jewel.

I am wondering if the body of my brother opened,

Would I find beaches?

And if that sea is green as Hainan

Or calm as Hawaii or if only tan people

Can tan in the surf, if only surfers

Can turn to the sun and ask for the sea,

For the memory of Japan.

I cannot remember the name of the place, he writes

To me and this is odd because I can

 remember the place so well.

 Yes, no question, certainly alludes to the sea's

  production of food, &c.  I recall having

 seen small sea farms (oysters or pearls or both, I

 guess) off the coast of Japan when we went by boat

 to an ancient monastery, partly abandoned.  There

 were heavily weathered little Shrines fairly close

 together scattered horizontally and vertically over

 a steep rock hillside

(almost 90º) in a mossy green forested area,

where the crane can have a rock.

We were in Japan, all together

where we would never go, but I remember

We were once on a rock in the sun.

It was Alabama and there was an airboat

And I wondered if the boat could take the rocks

in a place that has no name.

Hannah Star Rogers’ poems and reviews have appeared in The Kenyon
Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Tupelo Quarterly, The
Carolina Quarterly,  and The Brazenhead Review. Her flash fiction has
been honored by Nat. Brut and Glimmer Train. She received her MFA at
Columbia University, her PhD at Cornell University, and is currently a
visiting scholar the the University of Edinburgh. She has received the
Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship in Stuttgart, Germany, Djerassi
Artist Residency in Woodside, CA, the international artist residencies
at ArtHub in Kingman, AZ, the Arctic Circle in Finland, and with
National Park Service in Acadia, Maine and the Everglades, FL.