Tony Koji Wallin-Sato: California Poets Part 9, Five Poems

Tony Koji Wallin-Sato

December 22nd, 2025

California Poets: Part IX

Tony Koji Wallin-Sato

Five Poems

Early Morning Run from Cambodia Town to Signal Hill

Running the trail between pumpjacks and lilac lilies, a teenage coyote

struts on the incline. Looking back every few seconds, our eyes meet

while a deep breath fills my chest. For once, the sky is clear; the eastern

downtown skyscrapers reach out like Buddha's Hand and Catalina Island

stretches out like a plank of lopsided cedar. I follow the adolescent around

the bend, Khmer noodle houses and baseball fields below. A few clouds hover

above the peaks of the San Gabriel ranges, another deep breath fills

my chest. I film a quick video to send to my Yurok brother, because we both

know this encounter is a good sign for the day. He is headed to a central

valley prison to teach art, where another brother is waiting to hear a decision

of his release. A light wind gust blows the desert shrubs aligned on each side

of the trail, the coyote’s tail swishes with each step. She stops. I stop, another

deep breath fills my chest. During an exhale, the coyote slowly disappears

between the riparian on the downslope. She is headed towards another brother’s

house, one who lives with his father somewhere between the laundry mat

and Asian market. His teenage son just moved in and they are repairing

a relationship disrupted by 16 years of incarceration. I am alone again

on the hill between nodding donkeys and oil wells. Beneath this beach city

lies a petroleum field. A geological formation of oil and natural gas. The pumpjacks

keep pumping, the wind keeps blowing, and breath continues to fill my chest.

The Closure: Humboldt County, or

(It’s Strange to be Walking in Pants When You’ve Been Wearing Nothing or Sweats for a Year)

Audrey’s Manhattan reflects the lopsided cherry as if the moon were present

our first time back in The Speakeasy since the closure 

the corner L-shaped booth is occupied by three women in black dresses

an older couple in knitted sweaters and fedoras hunch over the mahogany top

I've never seen the inside of the bar without jazz musicians or smoke

the lights are unusually luminescent - the bartender's whole face visible

the bottom half, once shadowed, reveals a nose ring I've never noticed

the parking lot stages multi-instrumentalists with long beards

and a singer dressed like Dolly Parton

they aren’t playing but drinking on the tailgate of a red pickup truck

I shake the melted ice of my ginger-lemon, chew the candied gummy, leave a 5

we walk the alley of murals, elbows locked (when was the last time?)

I'm dressed in chinos, a blue turtleneck, my slides left in front of our sliding glass door

Audrey is vibrant as ever, the closure not affecting her desire to stay normal (or keep her flare)

her low-cut button-up and charcoal cardigan reminds me of a movie we watched recently

(but I couldn’t tell you what, I’ve never watched so many movies as this year)

the temperature drops as we enter The Bayside Waterfront

a Japanese Italian eatery overlooking the boat docks, small waves crashing the pier

Audrey thinks it's weird, but it's genius - noodles from opposite origins

(a meal for any party with picky eaters)

I crack open a Sapporo for Audrey and pour myself tea

the teppanyaki grill explodes in light - a child screams in wonder at the flames

while his parents look indifferent to the magic show of ingredients and chemistry

the heat and iron clanking expand throughout the bistro

the man with the metal spatulas looks like my dead uncle

(he didn’t make it through the closure)

the waitresses all look like distant cousins of Audrey

the chefs rolling rice in seaweed look like mine

half the guests are wearing stained sweatpants and tie-dye hoodies

Audrey can’t get over their leisure attire

never eat sushi in your pajamas she says especially out to dinner

the restaurant empties out slowly, Monk’s Ugly Beauty playing over the speakers

and the Taiwanese owner in the corner drinking wine in an elegant purple dress and heels

I slide one last inari in wasabi, she dips one last cut of Hamachi

Reflections on Ten Years Clean Off Heroin: Autumn in Sacramento

I miss the nod walking downtown Sacramento

in mid-autumn. The trampled streets, unruly,

covered in piles of leaves and bare oak limbs

clogging the gutters. I too reaching for

a point I was only told about but never

explained. The myth of one’s becoming

is a difficult transition when unclear. I know

I'm not supposed to say things like I miss the nod

but I would be lying if I said otherwise. We bury

the truth. Why? To make other people more

comfortable? That seems deceptive, like

walking across a wobbly bridge full of holes

and telling the person behind you the walkway

is stable. There is nothing stable. If my father

told me his sobriety was easy I wouldn't believe him.

He goes in and out of such states that it keeps me

from mimicking the same patterns. Maybe it's because

he has never known stability, his sobriety no exception.

Maybe it's because my mother raised me and I felt the burden

of rejection. Rejection not so much as abandoned but chosen

second, third, fourth…or last. Angulimala was a murderer

before he met the Buddha. The Buddha saved Angulimala’s

mother from dying at her son's hands. Her son was forever

changed and led the life of a disciple. I don’t see how he never

thought of his old murderous ways while helping others.

Milarepa killed his family by using Tibetan black magic.

His family enslaved him and his mother when his father

died. Black magic was his response. His remorse grew

until he found a cave that led him on the path. I think

of all the black magic I would boil and inject. An appropriate

response at the time doesn’t make it an appropriate response

always. When I walk along the rivers, split between the city,

I am taken to the place of shadows. In the autumn darkness,

the river reaches the levees. I am swallowed by those past

hauntings I thought I drowned, but darkness always surfaces

the memories within the tunnels of manzanita and pine. When I roll over

the mattress and hear the pitter-patter of rain, I am lost in the days of nod.

One Hot Summer in Lock Up: Observations on a California Correctional Facility Yard

old men strike handballs at high noon

            faded near-deflated blue balls bouncing

                        off sun warped green splintered walls

                                    and uneven half-dirt concrete courts

The cars plod in circles, corner to corner

            half draped garb dangles loose waistband

                        hands clenched tight limbs relaxed hanging signs

                                    red tailed hawk feathers pinched around bends

tattered bibles stacked forearm height

            monkey bar cracked palms clutched leather

wingspan dipped plank posture knees hover

                                    circled groups counting limitless angled taunts

skoal chew spit explodes 30 feet high

            sniper straps swing shoulder to shoulder

                        corso-faced new meat stabbed broken fence line

                                    high cliff monastery bell echoes bullet fire red dust

fingers laced behind sweat filled nape

            faces buried nose pressed hard soil

                        black suit geared army marches combative

                                    scarlet cardinal feathers leak gut holed gape wound

                        stretcher carries soft-boiled clump of clay

                                    another state-issued statue laid to rest

Kicking Dope on the 7th or 8^th Floor Lock Up in Either Sacramento or San Francisco

toxicity is extracted from my bones

I am nothing but poison and tears      

my face smashed against the cold cement floor

and my hands bend backwards towards my neck                  

I am cracking at every axis

my brittle particles float in space                  

hallucinations start to set in after 24 hours                

sleep never comes

the walls begin to close                                  

a voice appears

then another

then another

until the realization

the voice is mine

from another time

Interview

April 3rd, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

Tony Koji Wallin-Sato, Poet, Lecturer

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: At the heart of what you do is your work with current and formerly incarcerated individuals. Already during your undergrad days at Humboldt, you created the first Formerly Incarcerated Students Club (FISC) and two years later co-founded the Project Rebound on campus. What was the inspiration that made you want to work with this community of people?

TKW-S: I wanted to work with this community because this is my community. Even before my contact with the carceral system as a teenager, I was connected to it through my immediate family’s experience with incarceration. Another reason was the criminalization and othering of having a mother not from here and a country which had incarcerated so many of our people during WWII, but really all that had been planned decades before. The war was just their excuse.

When I went back to community college after my last incarceration I was fortunate enough to get support and assistance from a newly formed program helping formerly incarcerated students. This was in 2015, so things looked way different than they do now in California, where something like 80 community colleges have a support program, and nearly every CSU and UC as well. Back then it was still highly stigmatized, and identifying as formerly incarcerated and ex-junkie wasn’t something people were doing. The program I was in, however, was shifting that narrative, especially the students in the program.

I transferred to Humboldt and looked for similar resources but didn’t find any. With support of mentors, I started the first Formerly Incarcerated Students Club on campus to provide this support not only for fellow students and community members, but myself. That supportive and safe space is something I also needed.

DG: You have worked with both incarcerated youth and adults. To what extent is your approach different when working with each respective population?

TKW-S: Jimmy Santiago Baca, whom I consider a mentor, once told me that our greatest leaders— doctors, lawyers, artists, politicians, and educators—are locked away in prison. So, when working with our population, it's important to know that this community may be incarcerated, but they are keepers of deep wisdom, knowledge, and resiliency. They may be captive, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t, while inside, taking college classes or earning degrees. Coupled, hence, with the education they receive, the experiences they have make them mentors—people to listen to for answers regarding the problems we face in society. They are surviving and community building. We should thus focus on what they have to say. And we can do that by reading their poems and hanging their art in museums.

I think we approach youth as if young individuals have little-to-no wisdom to share with the world. At 13, I did have the maturity of a 13-year-old, but I also had gone through experiences that people have in their 30s. This is something I try to remember when I am working with incarcerated youth. I really want to meet them at the point that they are at in life. Young people should not be incarcerated. Period. The criminalization of youth, especially BIPOC youth, is an epidemic that doesn’t get enough attention. It’s now become more common knowledge that the brain doesn’t fully develop until we are 26, but our systems and the people who run them don’t operate with that understanding. Young people need to be nurtured, given space to roam; they need to have resources not only to meet their needs but to enjoy life. Yet the way our capitalist country works is by extracting from the majority to enrich the minority. This harms our vulnerable populations, and all that is hard to imagine if one has never been criminalized as a youth; as a consequence, this kind of violence on the psyche creates long-lasting trauma. We need to build a society where our community members don’t find themselves in situations that can lead to incarceration and harm. We can aspire to that by working together in order to ensure that everyone’s needs are met.

When I run a Buddhist, mindfulness, or writing program inside, I usually use the same material for either an adult or youth facility. It may look a little different in my approach—either slower or faster—but the circle remains a circle.

DG: In your 2024 article “Mentoring Formerly Incarcerated College Students: Desistance Lessons from Project Rebound,” you write: “For those with a conviction and incarceration history, education is a strengths-based endeavor. Working with students to identify academic pursuits at which they excel forefronts a formerly incarcerated individual's identity as ‘student.’” This connects to the “desistance narrative” you describe. To what extent do you use poetry in these contexts and what poets have you assigned?

TKW-S: Poetry has always been the medium that allowed me to explore identity and self-expression. When I facilitate workshops, it’s usually based on identity and I use poetic exercises to navigate one’s relationship with self, community, ancestry, space, and time. We are buried under layers of shame, guilt, worthlessness, imposter syndrome—the list goes on and on—and for those of us who have experienced incarceration, the narrative which society keeps on telling us is that we are bad people. Too often we start to attach ourselves to that label. This label, however, isn’t the truth. There are larger socio-political-economic issues that contribute to one receiving a conviction. This isn’t to say we don’t accept responsibility, but rather we critically engage in how the systems we live in produce crime and trauma— all things which set us up for failure. The school-to-prison pipeline isn’t a theory. Being a student in higher education is one of the pathways where we start to gain agency in our past stories as transformative experiences and identify with something positive, for good. Poetry is a tool to navigate this narrative and express ourselves. Poetry is Buddhist practice for me. It is resistance. It is a refuge.

I assign the poets who change me or have impacted me greatly. Of course, I've had the great pleasure of sharing both time and space with Jimmy Santiago Baca. I assign him always. Likewise, discovering Etheridge Knight was huge for me and so I incorporate his work. I love using Marylin Chin’s How I Got That Name in my work with identity. We usually do a workshop on a Name Poem. We read Teresa Mei Chuc and Assétou Xango. When speaking about place, we read Arthur Sze, Joy Harjo, Layli Long Soldier, Jerry Martien, Gary Snyder. Some others I use are Pablo Neruda, Brandon Shimoda, Victoria Chang, Franny Choi, and Justin Rovillos Monson.

DG: The title for your 2024 collection, Bamboo on the Tracks: Sakura Snow and Colt Peacemaker, which is your first full-length, sets the tone for the work. Sakura snow represents the Japanese heritage from your mother’s side while the colt peacemaker symbolizes the American heritage of your father. The collection is first and foremost about identity, about the struggle to return to places you’ve never been. It’s about survival, trouble with authority, finding yourself in what’s lost, and losing yourself in what can’t be found anymore. Given the intensely personal element in this collection, how much did you struggle with the writing process, what were the events surrounding it, to what extent did you edit or trust the first impulse, and what was the span of time in which you completed the manuscript?

TKW-S: I wrote a lot of Bamboo on the Tracks during my time in the MFA program at Cal State Long Beach. A lot of them started from notes and journal entries I had scribbled down. I’m an avid journaler and note taker. It’s one of my practices as a writer. If I don’t write an idea down I will lose it. I have journals going back to when I was like 11 or 12, so 25 years or so. I don’t recall struggling with the writing process for this collection because I was so actively participating in workshops with many great writers and reading multiple poetry books a week. I was uplifted and supported the entire way. I think this helped me with the concept of first thought best thought. I definitely trusted first impulses on a lot of these poems. That’s not to say they weren’t worked on and tweaked, but the core element stayed the same. Now that there's a few years of distance between me and the pieces I wrote at the time, the poems which didn’t make it into this collection are works I am returning to with fresh eyes.

DG: Bamboo on the Tracks: Sakura Snow and Colt Peacemaker won the Robert Creeley Award. Given the success and personal nature of the first collection, how heavily were you feeling the weight of expectation writing Okaerinasai, your second collection? In addition,  how did the writing approach differ that time around and in what way was it similar?

TKW-S: I was writing Okaerinasai the same time I was composing the poems for Bamboo on the Tracks. They were coming from such different places that I approached them very differently, which allowed me to view the pieces completely separate from one another; this paradoxically allowed me to focus on the work equally. When I write, I have no expectation in the beginning. I’m not thinking if it’s a larger project or a manuscript. I just allow for the meaning to unfold naturally. With Bamboo on the Tracks, I was writing individual poems without attempting to make connections between each one. I approached Okaerinasai as if I were painting a long Kakejiku, or art scroll. I didn’t know what I was painting, I just knew it when it was unraveled, it would reveal something.

DG: You’re currently at work on a third book. Without giving too much away, could you speak briefly about the manuscript and when readers might expect its release?

TKW-S: It’s finished, although some edits are bound to arrive in the near future from the editor. The book should be coming out later this year. What I can say about the collection is that I was listening to a lot of Thao Nguyen (and the get down stay downs), reading Ocean Vuong, David St. John, Brandon Shimoda, and K-Ming Chang. I was also traveling alot.

DG: You’ve talked about near-death experiences and have used the haiku as a way to put things into perspective. That paradox there is quite fascinating given the gigantic scope of the former and condensed nature of the latter. Naturally one gravitates towards heritage, but were there other factors that influenced your decision to choose the haiku as the vehicle to address these topics?

TKW-S: My first memory of poetry is haiku. Growing up my mother always had those Japanese calendars that were half calligraphy or art and a haiku poem. That was my introduction to what poetry is, so haiku has always been a part of the foundation. As someone who is multi-cultural and never really felt like they fit anywhere, I tend to find comfort in disrupting tradition. I believe haiku lends itself beautifully when it comes to expressing drug use, or, for instance, heavy topics like trauma, in opposition to just seasons and nature. Everything has beauty. Dogen teaches us this. I suggest everyone reading Etheridge Knight’s haikus or Bob Kaufman’s jail poems.

DG: Zen Buddhism has been a huge influence in your life. It’s unfortunately too often the case that much of the Western population has co-opted Eastern ideals for their own quick benefits, often driven by romantic ideals that have nothing to do with the religion in question. I’d hence like to know when you first discovered this ancient practice, what its essential elements are, and what misconceptions or myths exist around it that you wish people would understand?

TKW-S: Yeah, capitalism is a poison and will commodify anything. Buddhism has always had a strong presence in my life. When my mother and family came to the US, my grandmother brought along some of Japan in the form of butsudans, wooden figures, miniature statues, omamoris, and art. She has a rock with Bodhidharma’s face on it in a glass cabinet—and that is one of my earliest memories. So culturally, the art has always been there, but as a practice not so much. I got interested in it as a teenager because I was wrestling with my multicultural identity and addiction. So, Zen Buddhism represented ancestral lineages for me. I started to read books my mother had on the shelf but wasn’t meditating—at that point just learning. It wasn’t until the last time I was incarcerated that I found meditation as a practice and continued with it when I got out. I found a sangha the first week I was in the halfway house and have been wholeheartedly practicing for the last 11 years.

Impermanence. Interdependence. No-Self. I am inspired by Uchiyama Gudo.

DG: The Zen in Prisons (ZIP) group has allowed you to use Buddhist teachings with the incarcerated community. Could you speak a bit about how this works? And, likewise, as the key facilitator, what invaluable help do you receive to make it successful?

TKW-S: ZIP is relatively new, and I am not a key facilitator but a co-facilitator with my dharma sister Yakusan, along with my dharma brother Jindo. We just hit our year mark in January as ZIP, but it was something we were definitely discussing and planning well before then. ZIP is an affinity group of the Soto Zen Buddhist Association of North America that facilitates a space for prison dharma sanghas to connect, network, and exchange energy. Very grassroots and non-hierarchical. We found that Zen prison sanghas were isolated from one another and wanted to collapse the space between them. It’s been a really awesome experience so far, learning and engaging with other folks facilitating prison sanghas and letter correspondence—some for decades. We even just returned from New York and facilitated a workshop at the amazing Beyond the Bars conference. Before the creation of ZIP, I got involved with a community of formerly incarcerated Buddhists and Buddhist prison volunteers, and have, for the last six years, been doing this work, mostly in California. I’ve had the privilege of co-facilitating day-long retreats inside prison, running mindfulness and yoga programs in youth detention centers, meditating in prison chapels that felt like you were entering an ancient temple, and creating a multi-day meditation retreat for formerly incarcerated individuals. One of the highlights was being able to take youth with long term sentences outside of the facility and go on hikes throughout Southern California. While we work to dismantle the prison industrial complex and settler colonial state, I will always be involved with supporting resources and access to important liberatory tools like meditation. Meditating was such a transformative experience for me and most of the closest people in my circle. Sitting on the yard at the correctional facility I had been at transformed my being.

DG: In addition to the third book, what are you reading or working on at the moment?

TKW-S: I just completed a manuscript about my last two trips to Japan. I’ve gotten some good feedback from presses, but at the time it wasn’t the right fit for them. This gave me hope. So hopefully I’ll find a home for her soon. I’ve been working on short stories, and had a few published recently with The Minnesota Review and South Dakota Review. I’ve written two novel length works. Not totally satisfied with them so I'm about to go back to the beginning. Having shot film for most of my life, I’ve also been working on a double exposure project for the last ten or so years. That’s been really fun and expanding.

Author Bio:

Tony Koji Wallin-Sato is a justice-impacted scholar and multi-cultural Nisei writer. He is a co-facilitator for the Zen In Prisons (ZIP) group, an in-prison teaching artist with the William James Association, a lecturer in the CRGS department at Cal Poly Humboldt, and a current PhD student in the communication department at the University of Washington, Seattle. He holds an MFA from California State University, Long Beach, a BA in journalism with a minor in Religious Studies from Humboldt State (now Cal Poly Humboldt), and an AA in Journalism with a minor in Photography from Sacramento City College. His chapbook, Hyouhakusha: Desolate Travels of a Junkie on the Road, was published through Cold River Press. His first book of poems, Bamboo on the Tracks (Finishing Line Press), was selected by John Yau for the 2022 Robert Creeley Award and his second book of poems, Okaerinasai (Wet Cement Press), was a finalist for the 2024 Big Other Reader's Choice Award. His forthcoming book will be published through Kaya Press. He has been featured in various national and international anthologies, journals, and magazines.