top of page

Sawako Nakayasu

Sawako Nakayasu’s recent books are Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From (Wave Books), Pink Waves (forthcoming, Omnidawn), and The Ants. Translations include The Collected Poems of Sagawa Chika, and Tatsumi Hijikata’s Costume en Face. Other books include Hurry Home Honey, and Mouth: Eats Color — Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations, & Originals, a multilingual work of original and translated poetry. She has received fellowships from the NEA and PEN, and her own work has been translated into multiple languages. Sawako Nakayasu has also made numerous performances and one short film. Nakayasu’s translations of Chika Sagawa are included in the Rail Park installation “Dawn Chorus.”

Photo credit: Dirk Skiba

LAKE


Like this. Luminous continuity of seeing. On one half of the space behind my back, lies. On another half of the space behind my back, multitudes of people lying down. I need to know if the cause is death or sleep or daydreaming. I wake up every person who is willing to open. It’s true, there are mouths and they are full of it, but behind and from afar I can hear the marching band of hap, yeah, that old lake again, its hapful inhabitants sing, approach, and drown it all out, I insist that it does do that. And that I see you two. Even if I let go momentarily I still have an arm, even two, to fish out the meaty lines from between the layers of the water and for each one I toss out, it most definitely rains orange petals and this is why I have been saving the whole front half of my body, the direction I am facing with all of my forward self, so that I can feel everything that is headed this way, shining heads dancing this way and that.



COUCH


I am capsized all day long. I fell it, we marred – break – mar again. I entry, you execute, I return to cry and you had called it. Two eggs in the frying pan. Everything in order, furniture. Heat too swift, pop. Soft little tendril too late, brutal or enlightened yoke. Or both. A bite on the terra cotta corner, brick of plastic. Where in the break. Extin-guished phone call, I give you everything anyway.



A BOIL OF GLASS FOR GIRL G WHO IS FADING AWAY


Not by will, work, warp, not intention, not their outervention, not because boiling glass can remain fashionible or sustainible or con-tainible, not because it isn’t all that beauty, or because it is, because they are, or were, not because it doesn’t werk, they don’t werk, not because it can’t be fixt, they can’t be fixt, not because it is evil, mean, or ruthless, what are they, they are crucial, sheen, upheaval, not be-cause it is getting older and no longer as beautiful as the youngest boil of glass, not because the youngest boil of glass inevitably turns into a boil of glass much like Girl G, not because there isn’t mon-ey enough to pay for the indefinite youth of the boil of glass, not because there is not reason enough or justifications or rationaliza-tions enough or amicable feelings enough for the boil of glass that is Girl G, as well as the boil of glass that is had by Girl G, not because glass breaks and boils over, they take and change over, not because of goodn’ss or attempts toward fulln’ss, not because of or in spite of the glassy look behind the glasses of Girl G who has never truly felt it, never broke, never thorn, never hurt so fully as to see what it’s like to boil over, over and out, spill, away, simply because it is time for boils and glasses to come to acknowledge their relationship to Girl G and how very badly they need it.



GIRL AʼS PEANUTS AND GIRL DʼS MOUTHFUL


Girl A on the train with peanuts. The ephemeral fullness of Girl D’s mouth. Growing distance of the floor. A few bystanders are scraped by peanut shell, but believing themselves innocent, are willing to let peanut scars be peanut scars. How good of them. Girl A is soon bereft of all peanuts. Girl D, too, is close to the brink. And when it happens, it will not only rain peanuts, but also nails, bones, hair clippings, hammers, gravel, and broken-tongue talkers will all come shooting out of her mouth and fall down on everyone, on all of us, inside and outside and throughout the train and the rain and the girls and across the dead oceans, training up for the hard rain, for the new weather, for the new weather.



BRIGHT SUN IN THE HEAD OF THE GIRLS


But that is not all. Bright dried cow shit, bright hidden stones, bright precious clay whistles. When Girl F finally gets to sleep with Girl H, the bright wounds hammered into gossamer threads wrapped around the heart of Girl H reach through to the bright lines leaving tracks on the marrow of Girl F. The lines and threads fall into each other and encourage mutual sparkling until their love, secondary to that of Girl F and Girl H, heats up into a tiny little sun. They are not up in the head, as advertised, but that is how they protect themselves from being discovered and potentially harmed.




Poems from Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From. Copyright 2020 by Sawako Nakayasu. Used with permission of the author and Wave Books.

bottom of page