POETRY

Winner of the 2025 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York

Collage of Wreckage

By Hana Widerman     VOLUME 58 No. 3

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when the earthquake hit     Japan I remember
             it rained         in California
I walked outside     and imagined what it’d be like
         to be carried          by light and light and
water          like my mother          leaving home
     it was still      early morning      my grandparents were not
by the sea          in the mountains of Yamagata     rare
     fish flooded      the shores for months
after school we      released rainbow trout
             into the lake      in Japan              buildings filled
with water      I have never      known where to place
     the gap          of myself      I have never looked up
the names          the enka songs          my mother sings
     weaving      bamboo into wreaths
placing      freeze-dried     orchids      mimosa      ajisai
grape leaves          into art          the wind blows away
         her careful      angles              those same hands
     on the bedroom door          pushing it in before
             I sleep     her voice      the shocking abundance
         of blackberries      pulsing      under the sun      like brains
I must go into      the thicket      take the fleshy knowledge
         from her hands          she wants          me to remember
everything      she has touched          her first husband
who lives by the beach      in Sausalito          a pale
yellow postcard      for voter registration      the joy
             of seeing a blue jay              shimmering through
a redwood      forest          the remains of broken      dishes
     in a brown paper bag      a collage of wreckage          to prove
it can be done      sound of my mother’s      voice
         in my bedroom     pain or dream either way
too many times          remembered          as I see the world
     inheritance floods          our mouths each morning
like possession          my grandmother             my mother
             the hollow sound          of watermelon when hit
by a flat hand          house smaller          with each new
         layer of paint          in the hallways          I rock back and forth
with the weight      house braced
for movement              familiar shifts
                 of a woman dressing          to leave


•     •     •


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Born to a Japanese mother and an American father, HANA WIDERMAN is a poet originally from California. She graduated from Princeton University with a degree in English and creative writing and won the James Richardson Award in Poetry. She is currently a lecturer at Cornell University, where she received her MFA. A two-time winner of Cornell’s George Harmon Coxe Poetry Prize, her poetry has been longlisted in The Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition and appears or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, Washington Square Review, The Offing, RHINO, Pleiades, Zócalo Public Square, and elsewhere. Her poetry has been supported by the Saltonstall Foundation and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, where she was awarded a Katharine Bakeless Nason Participant Scholarship in Poetry.


VOLUME 58 No. 3