Tokyo Army Hospital, 1957
She looks over her left shoulder, body slightly twisted toward the shutterbug interrupting her conversation with the doctor. Nurse Hoshino, give us a smile! All in white. Long-sleeved, high-collared uniform. Nurse’s cap like an inverted Dixie Cup with a lacy brim. In a year, she’ll return to the States, meet a guy named Joe on a tennis date. Get married in two, become a mother in three, have me in six. Sixty years later, I’ll find the photo in my basement in a box, rummaging through her stuff I can’t throw away. I’ll post it on the Internet—Happy Mother’s Day! She’s twenty-nine, half my age. I want to go back in time, tell her something wise, or at least helpful, but having lived through a world war, she already knows more than I do.
In our dream band, on vibraphone:
Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is a writer and visual artist. He is the author of Ubasute, which won the 2020 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition, and the author of the full-length collection Common Grace, forthcoming from Beacon Press in Fall 2022. He is a recipient of a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry and a St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award in Literature. His poetry has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Poet Lore, DMQ Review, Tule Review, Louisiana Literature, The Night Heron Barks, and elsewhere. Aaron earned his MFA in creative writing from Boston University and is also the author and illustrator of Text, Don’t Call: An Illustrated Guide to the Introverted Life (TarcherPerigee, 2017).
Ran Off With the Star Bassoon 