Lying down on freshly laundered sheets,
my two-year old reaches his hand up
as if to catch faint stars in the ceiling
projected from pinpricks in the plastic
shell of Twilight Turtle. One of the gadgets
we’ve picked up at our local Goodwill,
it came with buttons that change colors:
blue, green, and amber. Tonight, he chose
green. Turtle’s much abused back
casts a tentative, blurry constellation;
my son points to one particularly drawn-
out star, whispering, “That, that.”
That? He shakes his head, “No, that!”
I’ve never been this sure of anything
I want. Gratitude comes slow for me,
after the fact, after I received a strange
gift I don’t recall ever asking for.
It keeps growing. I sing “Twinkle, Twinkle”
in Japanese, and the child next to me
is twisting his wrists in the greenish dark
under the random configuration of stars,
hands like flowers, eager to lose themselves.
Miho Nonaka is a bilingual poet from Tokyo. She is the author of The Museum of Small Bones (Ashland Poetry Press, 2020). Her poems and essays have appeared in various journals and anthologies, including Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, Tin House, American Odysseys: Writings by New Americans and Helen Burns Poetry Anthology: New Voices from the Academy of American Poets. She is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois.
