Bow Beach

Your slim brown hands
which don’t yet wear a wedding band
use chopsticks
to turn the mackerel
in its criss-crossed silver coat
studded with sea salt.

The oily white flesh
tastes like kipper
only different.
This is Yumigahama
and we’re here to show Sally
the best of Japan.

She and I swim
then listen to you talk
about our far-off foreign faces
bobbing on the waves.
Sally’s like a Fifties movie star, you say,
her blue eyes and boyish hair.

I don’t yet know
that our child will be a boy,
that we’ll call him Ryoma —
Dragon Horse,
and that I’ll adore
his slim brown hands.

Alex Corrin-Tachibana

First published in Tears in the Fence
Autumn 2020