Through these pines
The breeze equally
On her cheeks and mine
Yet how like strangers
Our thoughts.

Mune to mune to
Omoi kotonaru
Matsu no kaze
Tomo no ho o fukinu
Waga ho o fukinu

-Yosano Akiko

As the years cover our experiences in layers of grey forgetfulness and vivid memory, the eraser marks of wishful thinking and the sudden splatters of shock, our minds and souls tend to age at a different pace. Most of us stay locked forever at an awkward thirteen, deep inside the throne room of our minds. Some of us realize that time passes, and ( Read more... )

Breathing gravity ( Read more... )

Ima no ware ni
Uta no ariya o
Toimasuna
Ji naki hosoito
Kore nijuugogen

Ask me not
If now I write poems-
I am like
Twenty-five koto strings
Without a bridge for sound.

-Yosano Akiko, from Midaregami

Something popped under my fist, with the same dull sound as a chicken leg twisted out of joint, and something else gave slightly. My raw knuckles had given already; a sacrificed layer of skin scraped by impact with teeth. The pain in the reddening meat there was sleeping. It would not wake until it was all finished, and neither would I ( Read more... )

The sound of clockwork counting second by second pushes through thickening time until, coated and fatigued by the liquid years, it becomes a metronome of red droplets ( Read more... )

Crimson light rested in jagged pieces, broken by the spidery frame of the rosette window far above me. Prone, I stared up at this window, an oculus hiding a distorted and weeping sun ( Read more... )

Past the fragments of woodland where my old apartment stood was a field of perpetual construction. Hills of violated rock and constantly pressed or tilled soil would shift from day to day, as if they were still frames from a churning ocean of dirt. In time, it all became the pillared maw of an underground parking lot ( Read more... )

As the years passed, fraying into threads of memory, the pressure within grew stronger. Like so many other parts of myself, I did not understand what it meant. It was the fear of the infection, the futile terror of the animal who realizes it is unhealthy, and scrabbles to do something to heal when nothing can be done except through time ( Read more... )

Stumbling in the grip of my thirteenth year, struggling against myself and anything I could reach, I was (like most of my peers) trying to find identity in my defiance. Thirteen is when most begin constructing the masks they will use for the rest of their lives, and thirteen is when most begin to call those masks their identity, welding the locks ( Read more... )