My name is Podrigo Tumann. One of the things I love about writing poetry is what is reading it

is that sometimes I might write a first draft of a poem about something or someone that's annoyed me.

But as I edit the poem, usually the things about them that have annoyed me have to go to a new level.

And I have to look at the poem and through the poem look at them in a new way.

Not to justify the unjustifiable, but perhaps to ask questions about the circumstances, about the place, about the time.

And that asks me to ask questions of myself as well as to hold up accountabilities to them and accountabilities to me.

Smoke screen by No Uri Villa. This poem comes with a dedication for every hardworking father who ever worked at HCNS, especially mine.

HCNS stands for Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Company.

Was he a green, long-sleeved jacket and God-fearing man?

On the job, bloodshot, marrying metal in his heavy gloves, bringing justice to his father, who was also a smoking man.

No bathroom breaks, no helmets, no safe wards.

He whistled sugar cane through his neck, through his unventilated wife, his chronic black-ash daughters.

This is what a burn schedule looks like.

And if believing in God was a respiratory issue, he was like his father, marrying metal to make a family.

At home, he smoked before he slept. In the corner with the doerajar cigarette poise like a firstborn, well behaved, rehearsed.

Curtin's drawn, bedrooms medicated, he was always burning into something, part dark, part pupils.

For my father, the night was best alone, when only he could see through the world and forgive it.

I love how this poem is such an intense look at somebody who is also looking intensely.

It's a look at one person, the poet's father, and through him the poem explores a family and a society and an industry and centuries of history, too.

There's so much echoes of Hawaii's history from colonization to the overthrow of the kingdom of Hawaii into it being a territory of the states before it became a state.

There's so much of all of that is gathered into the question of burning in the context of this poem.

We learn a lot about this man, no reveal his father, but we don't know too much about her except for the fact that she has an extraordinary capacity to observe.

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