that you are plain.
| I made the soup best of all, and I only wanted to keep making the soup until I was old and bent over the pot like a letter. The fifth daughter cannot ask for more. | Your hair was matted under the poor, beleaguered veil | My hands always—do you know how eyes smell? | yes, yes, like copper filings, and green stems stuck upright in salt | —smell of eyes, of burnt iris. It made me happy, to breathe that smell in my bed at night. I covered my face with my fragrant hands. My mother gave me the bed closest to the fire. | I want the poise of this to last, when I stood over her, flashing violet and scarlet | she gave birth to me in the storage room, among all the grass jars of eyes, pupils peeping between the woven reeds, watched, watching, and all those fishy, sweet things watched my dark head emerge from my mother, watched her first milk fall into my mouth, and they applauded with their feathery lids | before she has looked up from her shamed posture to see that I am beautiful after all, beautiful enough for both of us.
| The sound of blinking was so soft, softer than my mother’s hand smoothing my wet hair. | Kyoko, Kyoko, you are so quiet within me, and closed, like a crocus, like a candle. O smooth wax heart, this is marriage, meat and maiden, and me around you like a closed hand, and me bleeding from the belly like a new wife, slit open, oozing blood onto the earth like a bedsheet | She said when the man who was neither sallow nor dark returned with that same veil dangling from his broken hands that this was enough, he had had four of her daughters, he would have no more of us. I hid behind the screen and was relieved; I could stay and wash eyes and boil water, I could stay with my mother and all the grass-jars would watch me while I moved through summers like water slowly through a canyon. | marry me, marry me, Kyoko, and I will rock you to sleep through a thousand thousand summers and you will sleep on a bed of my body, our bodies, sister to sister like a ladder into the earth | But he was penitent, he was sorry, he was bereft, widowed four times over, and give him but the plainest of the daughters left to her and he would not take that road again, but stay in this very house, dedicate his fortune to theirs, and they would all be safe, safe together, and they would burn incense on four graves forever, and there would be sons, yes, and the pot would keep bubbling in its way. | I want to hold the swelling of your body in my own coils, to circumnavigate your tiny limbs.
| She frowned, my mother, and her hand fluttered to her belly like a memory. She led me quietly from behind the screen, and tucked my unruly hair behind my ears. She patted my cheek. She told me to try to be a good girl, and with thin and bloodless lips whispered that marriage was a joy, a joy and a wonder. She put my hand in the hand of the man who neither laughed nor wept.
“Kyoko, Kyoko, marry me,” he said. | Kyoko, Kyoko, marry me | “Marriage is a joy, a joy and a wonder, and I will put honey under your tongue.” | I will put you under my tongue | Will it be all whiteness and the smell of clean skin, the way it has been in my heart | it will be all whiteness and the smell of clean skin, and you will be clothed in me like a dress, and I will hush you to sleep, plain little Kyoko | you will hush me to sleep | I will sing you to sleep. | I dreamed through my wedding-blood, you know | I know. You | I | were | was | waiting for me | you. |
I came whistling down the way | down the way, down the way | I came whistling down the way to my true love’s door | I left the window open and the wind was warm | My colors came filtering through rice paper, and touched | my face, woke me from my husband’s arms,