Issue 50: Summer 2020

from “Transfer”

Four vending machines roll-call length apart

[...]

Four vending machines roll-call length apart

Unsorted, children in
Awe like I was

Rows of primary colours
Startles into stimulated blurs, how

The White Peach Coca Cola
Shook in my still look, Kiwi
Melon, Muscat Fanta

Sidelong two crows feud
Over and untangle
A sparrow’s entrails

My gosh I thought
I adore ur energies

Along I’m supposed to give weight
To the trees piece by piece losing
Shade, barely pink slivers filling in
The bored river like a puzzle, to negotiate
Spring with the crowds
My mother said so, I guess

NHK’s morning programs say so, too, overarching
The cherry blossoms’ end

The expressive phase
Just two weeks, accompanied by fragile light
Passing in grids in between each wave with each wind

I follow a single petal after another
Fluttering till its interruptions
Entering the stream below as anxious loops
Make way for the next

Celebrate our enormous joys
Slowly fleeting into the next

“One year by August,” my mother said
“Put up a photograph, when it’s time, customary”
(To remember) my brother said
I step out tired from under, see
The daylight fully, a half-ring

Beam, my life that goes on
Your death that goes on…

In death do you relive
Still the dense
Horse of war

The untoward
Consequence of
Uncontrollable intrusions

That make
Life and a body that lives it

Is there time every day
To be in rapturous appreciation

Will I know I’m in it when it’s occurring
Over the contemporary
High-rises, the next place

And the next, touring or residing

Manage the stakes
Among each new gossip

Each bodily expression of emotion
Laughter, or the unbearable ring
Of looking intensely
Until there is nothing left in its line

Filled in with new or old grief
“Not unlike baby brain”
Softly pulsing not knowing where from here
In the blank unfamiliar
Of Spring in a new place having
Just a foot in

Yeah, the sun at peak
The people slyly drunk
An inseam running
Loose onto their stomachs
Where the bodies’ wellnesses
Lay warming further

[...]

Was little, barely spoke or listened
When I first visited relatives in Japan
Unaware and no claim to Buddhist practices
Was scolded by mother for eating the offering
Placed in front of my great-grandfather’s altar

When you die you must be kept
Inside a polished box I thought

Caught inside the mouths of those remembering
The stories which create shakes in our chests

Some imagine, some believe
They’ll gather in the summer
On a festive night

How I remember it drums drone from a tower
Where people gather, accept it as a focal point, circle it

The near black fog of a sea at night clears
Light by light set out by gentle push

Do they really
Gather, and without speech?

Or I face you
Without your speech?

Do they return
To the shadow of shadows?
The light of lights?

Yes, the light will become lights

Those who have shape will lose it

The place we are now is
A place to be fished from

We fish with our mouths?

 

About the author

Kou Sugita is a Japanese-born American poet, living in Seattle among the moss. Poems most recently in OversoundA Dozen NothingTYPO, and The Volta.