plum rain

during the fifth season, when the last cicada batch split  

their hulls along chitin linings of spare lungs, we made offerings  

for plum rain. you’d been searching for portents from your dead  

mother, folding our bodies close to siphon umeshu from paper  

cups. it’s too cloying, you repeat, for a brand that plugs an edict  

circa fifteen-fifty, the lord instructed his vassals to age three trees  

per surviving son, so that by the time they were conscripted 

there’d be enough ume, pickled in salt, to sustain the war effort. 

and i know i was supposed to keep us dry this weekend, as  

a test, i penciled activities in increments of thirty. but then  

there was the power outage, your exotic fish went belly-up  

expanding a puddle in our kitchen and we had to toss perishables:  

milk, soft cheeses, thawed meat, stews. boredom settled later  

into the evening. like amber, limpid and flush, the sun is a plum  

plucked young sent caroming against widemouthed glass 

after we drain it. you doze. left on the island like a hog,  

with the same gesture you pull the first cigarette from a pack,  

i’ve a bright circle caught between incisors, bit enough 

tart, olive flesh to reach stone.

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Naomi Shuyama-Gómez is a writer based in the greater NYC area, on ancestral and unceded Munsee Lenape land. Her fiction and poetry appear or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast Journal, The Cincinnati Review, The Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Florida Review, the minnesota review and Mount Hope Literary Journal. She’s received scholarships and fellowships from Kundiman, Immigrant Writers’ Workshop, CRIT Works LLC., Fine Arts Work Center, New York State Summer Writer’s Institute, and Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Her story is included in The Best Short Stories 2023: The O. Henry Prize Winners.