Janice Mirikitani
	Bio Why is Preparing Fish a Political Act? Preparing fish Each Oshogatsu* I buy a gleaming rock cod, pink, immaculately gutted. Each year, a respectable fish that does not satisfy (hard as I try) to capture flavors once tasted. Grandmother's hands washing, scaling, cleaning her fish, saved each part, guts, eggs, head. Her knife, rusted at the handle screws ancient as her curled fingers. Her pot, dented, darkened, mottled with age boiled her brew of shoyu sweetened with ginger and herbs she grew steamed with blood, water. Nothing wasted.            Someone once tried to sell her            a set of aluminum            pots, smiling too much, called her            mamsan.            Her silence thicker than            steaming shoyu,            whiter than sliced bamboo root            boiled with fish heads. Preparing fish is a political act.