Eternal Summer
I enter the convenience store alone,
handcrafted sign hanging as a crooked smile.
I came for breakfast spam musubi —
two dollars, fifty cents: for me and a friend.
I complain, but decide to buy them anyway.
The air conditioning whirrs, the store
stark as an emptied stomach.
I have never wanted for anything.
My father once shopped here, but now
he is tourist instead of customer. He knows
each yellowed shelf lining each narrow aisle.
I suppose they were new once.
Split a penny in half and use it twice
he jokes, gesturing at $6.99
neon laundry detergent jugs, dented.
I couldn’t afford these back then.
His tenement, cramped as a collapsed lung.
Fifteen students crouched around a table
for six, sifting through rusted coins.
Just enough for convenience store rice and spam.
A man died there. He wasn’t old enough
to drink. Pneumonia, tuberculosis? No one
knows; he couldn’t afford to go to the hospital.
They found his bloated body three days late.
I wander the store, pass ground beef
in robin’s egg blue trays. Pooling with red —
is it the same color he coughed, did it
splatter his immigrant dream?
This is Hawaii — eternal summer, sea-
fringe glistening with the aftertaste
of too much pineapple ice cream. Eternal
summer, swirled into a lollipop palette.
At the register, I slip my hand into my bag,
find a rusted quarter. The cashier asks
if I’ve been here before, if I know
this is paradise on Earth.