Poems by Guest Contributor, Kimiko Hahn

Wrigley Spearmint gum

Mothballs

“A certain Slant of light”: yellow rays through black leaves and

branches

A whale breaching—although that is Mother’s

Antidote: coffee with Miya and/or Rei

Antidote: coffee with Tomie and e-mails from Nicole, Meena, Marilyn, Jo—

Mildew

Antidote: well vodka

Princess Sissy coffee cup from Vienna

Turpentine from those large orange and black cans. (But do these things convey home or homesick? I cannot tell the difference, it seems.)

Hearing a mother speak Japanese to a baby: tabenasai

Not only mildew, but also mulch. (But do these convey home or homesick? Can I tell the difference—?)

And poster paint.

Antidote: Raisinettes

Cigarette smoke swirling in a small room reminds me of grad school. My boyfriend. His cigarettes. Our new electric typewriter. Typewriter ribbon.

An enormous elm in Prospect Park. Someone hung himself on a bough and at the time I thought, I would choose the woods behind our house.

Our Bodies, Ourselves

Geta

Oh, yes, and carbon paper

In spring it is slates of ice floating on a pond. Or, more towards summer, the pond steaming in the cool morning. Then, too the sudden buds turning the air green.

In summer it is the light. And the fenced-in area of the beach where the terns nest in dune grass. A month later the chicks cross the borders and we chase them back in. They are sand-colored and scurry into the shallow shadows. Also on the beach: beached-horseshoe crabs that need to be turned upright, large fish picked at by the gulls, comb fish in August, raspberry-picking at a country stand. Obon dance with the girls.

In fall, the cooling light. The red. The leave-taking. And everyone is back to all-business which can include a Gala.

In winter, the vineyards are mere fences of twigs and wires. The snow clumps across the corn or cabbage furrows. The city is black or black-and-white. The streets do not smell so rank. Holiday lights. New Year’s Day poetry readings. Feet that are cold until the thaw.

Kimiko Hahn, author of nine books, finds that disparate sources have given way to her poetry—whether black lung disease in Volatile, Flaubert’s sex tour in The Unbearable Heart, an exhumation in The Artist’s Daughter, or classical Japanese forms in The Narrow Road to the Interior. Rarified fields of science prompted her latest collections Toxic Flora and Brain Fever. A passionate advocate of chapbooks, her latest is The Cryptic Chamber. She enjoys her occasional teaching at NYU and is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, City University of New York.