Brandon Shimoda
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Hist Odres de Paradise
A rat is whispering
In my lap
The rat is large
An additional gravity
In the wet hairs of its stomach
Rises the feeling of
An earthquake
The earthquake knows its way
Through animal bodies
Especially human
Whispering
From my legs to my mouth
For a second I mistook
A rat for a cricket
Distant threshing
Moves a little
I can feel it
The first bars
Garbage trucks bringing
Ice cream
Lemongrass
In paper cups
What else is there to do?
What else is there undoing?
Japan occupied Taiwan for fifty years
That is what keeps me
In touch
A lush
Boat at the bottom
Of the South China Sea
The boat was torpedoed in 1942
By a United States submarine
The Africa Maru is the boat
On which my grandfather immigrated
Japan to the United States
He was eight, alone, 1919
Bad ease
Guileless evolution
I do not understand
Appears to be
An effort by the living
To keep from being
Earth disheveling the altar in
Spine and throat
Reconstituting
On the bottom of the sea
I am
Prone to wrap a young boy around
The railing
Skin peeled from his hand
Wrapped for protection around another
To extract the tremor, however
Distant, coming to
Disclose the distance for
A swim down to the wreckage
Head that’s weed
Sky waving between
High, officious reeds
Embracing the white
Pulsing
Hot and tight like a child
To the death of its first senseless animal
The moon is purple
Drafts of light
Waters toss
Faces, I am certain
Mine will go
In the moment of seeing
Will I remember it better?
Let it release
An expanse of history
One ear to another, I speak
In a voice I do not recognize
Do you feel the lightning burn the city?
And still
Grow aftershocks?
When it is shockless
An earthquake begins
As premonition
Adhered
To the underside of the earthquake’s
Ferry down to the wreckage
There will be mediumship
Clear feeling
Nothing
But space
To transition
The island
Collapsing
The mind into
Infatuation
Coloring a feminine contour
Split
And left
Behind
The great wind
Hopelessness is
Congenital? Lymph?
Only shadows, no one there
But if I see it clearly as
The beautiful island
I might have then
Forgotten, or forget
When translated what, of what
Threads the veins
Touches the foot Touch the foot
Ground nervously the silence
Blinding at
The curve
Hist Odres de Paradise
It’s raining in the museum of literature
The walls are atomized with scores
Day in, day out, is
Miserable
Sounds
Elating us, with
Or without literature
We could not be any more
And matter less than
All that matters
Demonstration
Reconstituting works of nature
Books of nature
Books
Necrologies captivating hands
Withdrawing
Up the rain, a woman wearing
A book of garlic
At an intersection
In a Karma wheelchair, riding
A motorbike in a gutter
Beside the museum of literature
Shaved head and saffron robe
Waving and sputtering
No! No! No!
Where nine brown-robed monks are
Droning, the sky is
A lesbian hyacinth
Hist Odres de Paradise
To pick a pork bun from a throng of pork buns
To pick a pork bun from a throng of mounded pork buns
To watch your hand grow longer
To watch your hand dissever
To achieve the architecture
You aspire to
Evolve in
The pork bun’s senselessness
Each pork bun motivating the mound
Collapsing is
The sound, dissevering
Fashions, each is
Natural. There is no mound
Unproduced behind
A wall where genus
Slackens into family
Until their ultimate confession
Should be their first confession
They did not want to live
Inside, but wanted to be
The dwelling for life
To live inside of family
Should be
Earth, what lives on
Earth should be what
Earth is now
The television’s on. A head is
Showering bright skin. There is
A face exposed
In liberal translation
When someone has a face, it is not common
To say that someone’s showing skin
But has a face, the head is
Speaking, concentrating
What it has to speak
Into the face
When all you see is
Liquid integument
Covered over when
Lights
Go out. See what that is
Making sound outside
The sun
Grazing faces of the family
Clocks or absent-minded
Bakeries in air, eating around
The orchidaceous scent
Rising from the pork bun to
The orchid implicated, it is
Warm and it smells good
It will be eaten or will not
The rind of earth, the momentary
Widening of a nostril
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Brandon Shimoda is the author of several books, including Evening Oracle (Letter Machine Editions) and O Bon (Litmus Press). Recent writings, poetry and prose, have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Felt, Hyperallergic, The Margins (AAWW), The New Inquiry, and No Tokens Journal. Hist Odres de Paradise were written in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, where Brandon has spent the last six summers. He has lived most recently there, and elsewhere.