Floating Clouds

By Aaron Caycedo-Kimura

                 Hisako Hibi, oil on canvas, 1944

These are not the kind that billow over the Bay,

sail past Angel Island and over the Golden Gate.

Not even the gray cover that hung over Hayward

two years earlier, when she, George, and their children,

Tommy and Ibuki, waited to be bussed to Tanforan—

suitcases and bed rolls stacked around a lamppost.

In Topaz, where these clouds loom over barracks,

James Wakasa, a sixty-three-year-old chef, was walking

his dog inside the barbed wire fence. He was shot dead

by a guard-tower sentry. Sculpted on her canvas,

these cumuli look like bodies wrapped in sheets,

motionless, ready to be carried out and buried.

Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is the author of Common Grace (Beacon Press) and Ubasute (Slapering Hol Press). His honors include a MacDowell Fellowship, a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, and a CT Office of the Arts Artist Fellowship Award. His work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO, The Cincinnati Review, and Shenandoah.