Sample Poems by Joan E. Bauer

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Picture Perfect

That’s the sofa where my sister & I practice
standing on our heads. There, the pages
open to Chopin on the dusty upright
where my mother tries to teach us, but we’re
lazy & stubborn.
On the bookcase, 36 volumes of Funk & Wagnalls
for the children & a raft of self-help books
which my mother reads. 1953, the year
my father nearly packs his grey suits,
socks & slide rule for London & some

British woman. Rooms half-lit, Venetian blinds
closed to the neighbors & the beauty of azaleas.
Only his father’s protests convince him to stay.
There’s the backyard where I find my mother
crying & cursing at the clothes line & the kitchen

where she stands boiling chicken & potatoes.
She’s Italian, but has no love for the tomato.
Dad isn’t home for dinner anyway, working
months at some Mojave missile site, later
Kwajalein. In the hallway, the canaries.

Cluttered bedroom, small desk & chair,
dictionary, baby-blue wallpaper with little roses.
My school work in chicken scratch.
Despite her travails, my mother defends me
when my teachers complain of my failure


to engage my thumb properly while holding
a pencil, all the times they chastise me
for daydreaming & rolling my eyes.
After my father leaves for the last time, my mother
learns to cook Chinese. It isn’t half-bad.

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Manzanar

for Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston,
author of Farewell to Manzanar

The word, Spanish for apple orchard
but by 1942, no orchards in the Owens Valley.

Water rights sold in the Twenties
to Los Angeles, the land left parched & dry.

Jeanne remembers: snow-capped Sierra Nevadas,
high winds, tumbleweeds, dust storms, lousy food.

*

Cousin Blanche, most accomplished & brainy
of our Italian relations. 1939 UC Berkeley grad.

At weddings & funerals, I’d study her glossy hair
pulled taut in a bun, her face, a powder-white mask.

Her husband sported a bow tie & smarmy smile.
Their first teaching jobs had been at Manzanar.

*

Japanese subs off the coast. Blackouts, sirens. Panic
when the air patrol mistook weather balloons for attack.

For the war effort, families bought bonds, collected paper,
even rubber bands. Did it feel patriotic & brave

teaching at Manzanar? Among the teachers, Quakers,
retirees, young college grads. Some were friendly

& nurturing, some were stern & rule-bound. I wonder
about my cousin: What kind of teacher was she?

*

If you had 'Japanese blood' & lived out West, it didn’t
matter if you were a citizen. 24 hours to sell everything.

At release, every man, woman & child given $25
& a bus ticket to wherever they could find to go.

By then, Jeanne Wakatsuki’s father had grown so bitter,
he rarely spoke to a Caucasian again.

*

36 barracks made of tar paper without ceilings or toilets
or wallboard. Furnace in summer, icebox in winter.

Steel army cots, straw mattresses. Communal latrines
& showers. Families made furniture from orange crates,

created self-help societies & gardens amid guard houses,
armed MPs, desert & barbed wire.

Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston was married for 15 years
before she told her husband James about Manzanar.