Photo by Tyler Steimle
Assistant Editor Emily Rose Cole: W. Todd Kaneko’s “White Hot Star” paints a richly layered portrait of masculine inheritance. “[E]very boy should inherit / his father’s knife,” the speaker of the poem insists to his son. Yet this same speaker also knows “how it feels to live / without a knife,” an absence that yawns through the poem in the form of a black hole. My favorite part of this poem, though, is the ambiguity at the end. The brightness that the speaker leaves us with could be the glint of a knife. But just as easily, it could be a guiding star.
To hear Kaneko read the poem, click below:
White Hot Star
The knife my father kept in his car was gone
by the time I got to his house—nothing
but proof of insurance and the gas tank
half-empty. I claimed a different knife I found
in his desk because every boy should inherit
his father’s knife—I tell my son this
when he looks at the old black-handled
blade I have hidden in the utility drawer
at our house. This morning he told me
how a black hole is born when a star dies,
life collapsing and leaving a blank space
that swallows the light, the comets,
the street, the station wagon—everything
extinguished, lost. Neither of us understands
the science of gravity, but I know how it feels
to live without a knife: tear what you can
with your hands, rip everything with your teeth,
and when the lights go out, feel nothing
and imagine someone else’s fingers
tracing the glint of your father’s knife,
its keen edge against their thumb.
When my son and I talk about courage,
he claims the dark is the only thing
he fears and I want to tell him, one day
the darkness will swallow everything
and someone who loves you will leave you
something bright to keep you safe.
W. Todd Kaneko is the author of This Is How the Bone Sings (Black Lawrence Press, 2020) and The Dead Wrestler Elegies (New Michigan Press, 2021), and coauthor of Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic 2018). He teaches at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.
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