- 3 days ago
- 1 min read
Fort Missoula Alien Detention Center
5:00 a.m. Snow fills the fenced compound.
6:00 a.m. Wake up. Dreamless.
7:00 a.m. Breakfast. Hold a spoon to the sun. It doesn’t disappear.
8:00 a.m. Roll call.
9:00 a.m. Polish a stone and then another.
11:00 a.m. Lunch. Eat an onion from Etsuko’s camp. Taste what you hope is her hair.
3:00 p.m. Read an American mystery novel.
4:00 p.m. Roll call.
5:00 p.m. Supper. Sit in the mess hall until your clothes smell of hot dog water.
7:00 p.m. A thousand Issei men in the shower room.
8:00 p.m. Search for anything green similar to the color of Yasashi’s kimono the day you met.
9:00 p.m. Go to bed.
2:00 a.m. Talk to the shadows in your sleep. Mistake them for the children. Laugh, alone.
TROY OSAKI is a Filipino Japanese poet, organizer, and attorney. A three-time grand slam poetry champion, he’s received fellowships from Kundiman, Artist Trust, and the Poetry Foundation. His work appears in Poetry, The Missouri Review, The Offing, and The Gate of Memory (Haymarket Books, 2025), an anthology by descendants of Nikkei wartime incarceration. A member of the National Lawyers Guild, he earned his Juris Doctor from Seattle University School of Law, where he interned at Creative Justice, an arts-based alternative to incarceration for youth in King County. He lives in Seattle, WA, where his great-grandpa was the Buddhist minister at the Seattle Buddhist Temple during World War II.