ABSTRACT

  In my grandmother’s Japan there was no word for lesbian. That came with the Westerners, their black suits and white skin, the Caucasian dichotomy— Light and dark, Male and female, religion and sex. A shadow in a nether region, I disappear in your language, mine now I’ve been dispossessed. I flounder in a trough off the Galapagos Islands in the doldrums of August. Untranslatable, I am a squid riding the waves. My tentacles ejaculate black ink into this estuary of self-exile. Your vocabulary translates me from a pictograph into a nonsense verse that makes sense only in English. The erotic has its own etymologies. Like me, it defines itself. Each morning while she prayed at her altar to our ancestors, my grandmother had multiple orgasms. She understood death. Eros ran through her like sweat, honoring her with hallucinations of the third, most marvelous eye.