This poem so rooted in local life won Daniel Tsukayama the New Writer runner-up prize in the 25th anniversary writing competition sponsored by Bamboo Ridge Press. The language and fragmented pace conjure up this aging woman, her quiet life, her home and her loneliness.

YOU WOULD HAVE PREFERRED HILO

where anything will grow, where you were born to the red ginger.

but here you have your garden, this is where your husband brought you

to plant melons and wait for the sun.

it is where I find you today moving slowly

as the breeze, your movements like the sheets that you hung to dry

from the fence to the lemon tree, it is where you waited for the four of them

your sons, to come home from the ocean.

I think you have forgotten Hilo and the ginger field and the rain

here has found you

moving slowly

it has found you eating quietly alone

at the edge of the kitchen's fluorescent glow

and falling asleep on the floor beneath the television

where late at night your husband still taps you on the shoulder with his foot

you will get up and wrap the house with a string of footsteps

first the TV and then the kitchen and then the heavy door

making your way back to the cool dark

where ti leaves scratch slowly beneath the window

Reprinted by permission of the author. This poem previously appeared in the 25th Anniversary Issue of Bamboo Ridge Press (2004). Poems for this column are selected by books editor Wanda A. Adams. This column does not accept unsolicited poems and considers only poems previously published in an independent anthology or collection.