University of Northern Iowa

SushiAuthor(s): Chad DavidsonSource: The North American Review, Vol. 292, No. 3/4, The Annual Summer Fiction DoubleIssue (May - Aug., 2007), p. 74Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25478920 .

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NAR

CHAD DAVIDSON

Sushi

They wear their cargo oversized,

parked parallel like freighters in a bay. From the oily soy, a glint.

Once, because we heard we should,

we asked the chef for sea snail still in its shell, then pried the appalling braid

out with a skewer. Our own tongues felt foreign. I want to doze on a raft of sushi, wave to my wife fishing from a nearby pier

where wrong-eyed carp peer back not in fear but astonishment at her many tendriled listening

to the water's body. She wears a Gilligan hat

low, shuffling her feet to keep warm, as young Japanese women do in Italy,

in their slip-ons, past countless churches

and bronze men on horses.

In Tokyo and Laguna Beach, for example,

small boats circle, each one captaining its horde finely knived: fatty tuna argentine

marbled, blackened eel sesame specked.

When we took my parents, they were shocked

by color deprived the thinnest gauze of culture.

Spider roll, spider roll: language was invisible

fish writhing on their tongues writhing like the dragon made of pineapple,

which the chefs brought especially to us

after sea snail years ago, on Lover's Lane,

Dallas, Texas. How they did it still amazes me,

my parents, sushi-less all those years.

My father, I swear, asked for a fork.

My mother described the characters on her sake bottle, quote, neat. Such patinas

of interest, durable porcelains they spent forty years perfecting. I just couldn't ask for more Diet Coke for her, a fork for him. To eat beside them,

though, on that narrow bar before the wonder of parcels?the purple exclamations

of the octopus cups, tamago stacked like lumber?

was to visit some small Japanese coastal town,

one not ever filtered through Kurosawa or even Hokusai, though the inhabitants

were just tiny and nearly as beautiful. One far enough from Tokyo to know a leisurely swim through late afternoon,

snagged on the barbs of memory. Such events, I have learned from learning Italian, are almost untranslatable,

which originally meant unable to be carried across.

And it pleased me finally to know my parents, in that sushi bar, contained their own

worthless economy, that the words on their tongues?

Tamago, Maguro, Uni, Sake?like the babble of new lovers, like the people of Hokusai, were peripheral, insignificant, and glorious.

ROBYN SARAH

Lull

Drunken bees cling and doze in the cups of the rainy hollyhocks

and afternoon is still, the day a dull silver.

Summer malingers. Soon she will drop her kid gloves and abdicate to fall,

but for now this lull is our cradle.

74 NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW May-August 2007

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