Okinawa, 2016
Amber Adams
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In the years before you died, you lived
on the island where the kijimuna eat the eyes
of fish, and seeing the sea is inescapable.
By the time I made the many flight trek,
you’d become boyish again in linen shirts
and water shoes. Surf-polished, less
proving. Leaving the airport you said,
you’ve gotten too serious. Maybe you were right—
my focus had been land-locked,
mountainous, rigid. I could not stop
looking towards the tidewater. When we did go
to the beach, I waded into a cove
of urchins and had to slow-shuffle out while the tide
slapped me in the chest. I tried to explain
this had been the way of things for me
lately. Every step was spiked—an impaler
waiting. You knew what I meant, but you
weren’t going to get lyrical about it.
We left, and went to a triptych of gardens,
coastal balm thick in the trees. We left coins
on Buddhas. You stopped
in a pottery village, bought a pair
of shisa dogs, and gave me instructions
how to ward my home. That night
at the restaurant, you ordered for us.
When uni came to the table, you said,
Just eat it and I knew you meant all of it.
AUDIO
Listen to Amber Adams read “Okinawa, 2016.”
About this poem: This poem begins with the appearance of a kijimuna, which is a Japanese spirit particular to Okinawa. It is a mischievous, child-like yokai, and statues of them (which look like little red-haired woodland fairies) are all over the island. I was thinking about them in relation to my brother and how, in the years before he died, he became more easy-going, boyish after he moved there—almost an embodiment of a kijimuna. In this poem, I was trying to capture the kind of adult sibling relationship we had which was compassionate but not overly demonstrative. There was often a subtext to our expressions of care that were rarely verbalized. Like in the final line of the poem, where the ordering of uni was a sly response to the encounter with urchins previously experienced in the poem, or the buying of shisa dogs which was an acknowledgment of my misfortune and an attempt to protect me from evil spirits. These were nonverbal extensions of the clipped conversation about life, but they were actually more conversant than a deep heart-to-heart conversation.
Amber Adams is a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts fellow and the author of Becoming Ribbons (Unicorn Press, 2022) which was a finalist for the X.J. Kennedy Prize. Her writing has appeared in POETRY, Poetry Northwest, American Literary Review, Narrative, Witness, and elsewhere. She received her MA in Literary Studies from the University of Denver and her MA in Counseling from Regis University. She lives in Longmont, Colorado.
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