The Cost of a Dime

No jewelers there

she told us and laughed,

a hard, foreign sound

to granddaughters who'd never heard

of camp and internment

in state school elementaries.

*

Against her curled palm

the circle made from a dime

tarnished and thin,

her fingers too swollen now

to wear the broken band

my grandfather made decades ago

with a hammer,

a nail and a coin.

*

When they released families

from barbed wire fences, she said,

warehouses had been ransacked by thieves,

a history destroyed for scapegoats.

Squatters had taken

over houses and doors,

and our culture needed years

to rebuild homes and hearths

torn up by neighbors

pretending to follow laws.

*

When she died

my mother got the good pearls,

my sister her jade necklace--

they wore them

to the Buddhist temple

where we burned incense

and cried together.

*

But I inherited

my grandmother's palm,

the thinness of the band across it

like our family's war-tarnished name.

My fingers are too big for the ring

but I can hold history in my mouth

as my daughters listen

to the cadence of camp stories I tell them

passed down from my grandmother

about the value

and reason

for a dime.