Todd Kaneko

They Say This is How the Witch Sings

A witch blankets herself in whispers
of mysterious pine, studies midnight
with ancient eyes glittering vigilant
from barrow to bough. Some evenings,
unable to sleep, her songs interrogate
the darkness, punctuated with mothlight—
sounds that escape a woman who has lost
her house to war, husband to emphysema.
She might emerge from the gloom
on silent wings, a surge of feathers
and starshine melting swift into wind.
The witch’s lips are keen for shrews,
ears sharp for field mice, for taunts
aimed at the dead. When trees break
into a sparkle of lark and cicada,
she will fold herself into a hollow
where she crafts charms against death,
a jagged question about the taste of
birdsongs, a new language for grief.

---

Only Now Do I See that the Wind has Always Been Full of Arrows

My grandmother’s house once stood
her ground, looming black against her
city block. The war blew through the kitchen,
crashed against staircase and bone, against
her shrunken body. She watched the city
through thin windows—bicycles ripping
across her lawn, a dirty game of kickball
threatening the begonias.

The neighborhood knew all about her--
that mean Japanese lady, they said.
Tough little witch. When that boy shot her
front door with an arrow, she marched
out to the porch, yanked it free,
her tiny fists daring him to come take it back.

Memory gusts through us, invisible
save for what we see in broken windows.
My grandmother’s secret—that tiny prison
in the Idaho badlands where winter raked
cold teeth across her back, where chicken wire
marked the perimeter of home. There is no place
like a well-disguised scar.

I feared my grandmother, when I was a boy,
that drafty mildew of her living
room—at her funeral, my cousin insists
she was the nicest lady in the world.
We all agree that her house didn’t stand long
enough, its guts spilling forth
a cautious shadow when it finally fell.




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Todd Kaneko currently live in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he teaches at Grand Valley State University. Todd has received fellowships from Kundiman and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. His work has appeared in Bellingham Review, Los Angeles Review, NANO Fiction, Southeast Review, Blackbird, The Huffington Post, and elsewhere.