Toshiya Kobayashi

You can take your island gossip and cram it
I'm no blushing mail order geisha from Kyoto
I didn't marry him for my green card
And I never used to be a man

When Finn walked into that dive outside of Tokyo, fresh off a commercial trawler
And reeking of dead fish and sake
I knew I would spend the rest of my life with him
It was that simple

From the stage I locked eyes with the tall bearded New Englander
I was doing Proud Mary that night
Five foot two in my six inch heels
Five foot seven if you counted the Tina wig
And I was rolling on the river

We got married the next morning
He sold everything he owned and bought his own boat
And I left my good job in the city
And together we traveled the seas

We washed up on the Jig when the money ran out
The island needed a ferry captain and Finn needed a job
Now the Proud Mary makes six runs a day
And I perform below deck at noon, three, and seven o'clock on weekends

Every night Finn turns the wheel over to Skip to watch my last show
I can see that his beard has become streaked with gray
And my legs aren't what they used to be

But still he smiles from across the room
And we are kids again
Back across two oceans in a small bar west of Tokyo

William Hayward

By the time that I crawled out of the Plymouth
I knew that Laurel was dead

This little white girl from an unbelievably white family
Lay sprawled a few feet away from the edge of the Clay Cliffs
Jagged diamonds of windshield glass in her hair
Caught the last of the sun's rays as it winked out over the ocean

I held my palm to my forehead, watching the blood drip down
into the soil of my people
We were on reservation land still,
about two miles from the town line

This was not a good place for an island girl to turn up dead
And drunk
In the car of her equally drunk Indian boyfriend.

It wouldn't matter that she had been the one driving
Or that she had been the one that had downed a fifth of Jack Daniels
Followed by a few pearly pills filched from her mother's bedside drawer

It wouldn't matter

I stumbled home for three miles in the dark,
bleeding and crying and cursing
Knowing my life here was over

They would come for me
Not Sherriff Milchin, whose jurisdiction ended back at the town line
Not the feds from the mainland, who always came late if at all

They would come for me filled with rage and grief and a desire for vengeance
And I'd be found swinging from a tree
Or maybe not found at the bottom of the bay