Irie - The Temz Review

Fiddleheads for Interned Japanese-Canadians

By Kevin Irie

Their stems are the paralysed
green of a caterpillar

eaten by insects.
Husks cover them like wings of horseflies feeding.

Their buds are spring clocks
to be scrubbed and boiled, washed until edible.

Old nisei know just how to do it,
internees who foraged

in woods of B.C.,
who refuse to hunt them any longer.

No appetite left for this circle of daggers
on a knife thrower’s wheel.

They can discard that life
like snapping a crozier, its head

a lab lid of brown
dead grubs.

Cast off those years.
You don’t have to eat fiddleheads.

Bitter back then. Still bitter
today.

Spadina Chinatown Encounter

By Kevin Irie

My individuality runs off from itself
as I exit the streetcar

in the heart of Chinatown,
the corner of Spadina, a weekday rush

of changing signals. People
crowd the sidewalk like the unboxed produce

lining the street.
I know what I’ll see:

dark hair, brown eyes, a bridge on the nose
too small for glasses to not

be a problem. My face
marks the limits of my separate intentions.

When am I also
not how I am?

An old woman stops to ask me a question
I don’t understand,

as if my looks guarantee her
an answer while all around me

Cantonese and Mandarin
mute the only language

I really know.
I don’t speak Chinese,

I say with a smile less sincere than insistent,
as my own hand points

to my mistaken self
in the only translation

we both know verbatim.

An Erasure Poem for Interned Japanese-Canadians

By Kevin Irie

Kevin Irie is a Japanese-Canadian poet from Toronto. He is the winner of the 2024 Short Grain Contest for poetry in Grain Magazine and second runner-up in the 2024 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest in The New Quarterly. He is part of the upcoming anthology The Gates of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration (Haymarket Press, 2025). His most recent collection is The Tantramar Re-Vision (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021).