Kou Sugita, From “Transfer

from “transfer

kou sugita

How does the electricity lick Off the ends of our circular arms

Slowly and lapping our heels Lilac wise Or hackles of rage

Language / never Precisely

Into its cadaverous memory

What was sensual only In the light / inching closer Between my synapses

Out of echoes— Want to say oh Look my family mirrored In the commercial blimp passing overhead

A speck in a speck in the speck / And yes Hear the loneliness In their will / collective / collected? / after imaged / webbed /

/ Eyes then hand then sun Same green silhouette / same red vein (Realize a suspicion in that line) Out on a valley fluff grass / free to think anything Only a fumbled focus to knowing / All my friends and I Will labor no way around / decompose while after making Circle towards dying

No holidays / except in friends So how to believe in a Most prodigious night Of all nights on earth?

There are ghosts in me Who can still bruise Some already in Passing / Pushing through

A silver arch Of waves Like a knife’s flathead pressed Against a thought

Don’t slip / be ready to be Ignited / On how many nights Is there celebration of their breath

Okay shed

The translucent Cicada wing Batting the dead off The shadow of a shadow of a sound

I’m trying a look / over the tranquil hills (Have more than a gaze overseas)

An artist and a critic (post world war II) argued From their writing desks / Whether a decomposing Human being hanging droopy from a lawn chair (An alien enormous head) Is a lamp shade made Of melted skin or is not lamp shade at all

(Learned origin / the writing desk / this circumstance is Protected accumulated clockwork / Will recomposed)

The critic says the molded plastic Body is simply horrifying Is most concerned with the inability to name Its sex

The artist knows our bodies have ghosts to negotiate with Who are already moulted

Light shines adequately appealing through real skin (the critic)

Have no love or hate for humanity (the artist)

At the flash of the atom bomb / former human beings Fixed themselves on walls Named white shadows Before and after / has been humanity against Blank et cetera Nature now containing electronics Our brains themselves Circuitry When we’re dead Says a hospital patient Like television / clipping / not shot but shut Off / In nature / There has only ever been against The conquered lands Are decomposing

So there we are / already A merger?

Walking, grazing among the brick with little nails My new home, the macro of it, is safe For me / my home is a safe And there is an exit

Where / the exit is not always my exit I hear the echo (My mother started And her mother) the drip first rippling

(Or what is available by sound) Remember the first day as a baby or as an adult laughing A new laugh? Congratulations, we deserve its well

My home is a safe

Inside a lighthouse softly There are walls between the / our / waters

It’s yellow rotating as spotlight against an ocean Yellow the color of nostalgia / It seems I can only remember one funeral (or memorial / ?) In Japan / men and women silent / children

On the ground like purple balloons (Assume the gesture of holding in all liquid thought) / I let mine drag on Sun bleached concrete / sputter up into the smoke rising From the altar’s shiny black stone

Clean into the sky I become part of the forgetting A younger self somewhere in Oregon Learned the first words (can) become secondary From when / Learned by meeting / Stem(ing) From the exports grandparents packaged

Then dang in unison / with all my friends / Learned new This time in an age of progressions / Progressions of place Sitting around the oh yeahs / my head Reeling the realness / It’s like someone else’s fist

Clenching a red sheened balloon Becomes / as if an ours / on a Pacific shore Its firey dawn / I stick out my tongue to the source Fireworks / And settlers provoking some seals

This excerpt was previously published in Oversound. kou sugita is a Japanese-born poet who was raised in the states. Currently living in Seattle, he seeks out lonely patches of moss. Poems most recently in Oversound, Typo, The Volta, A Dozen Nothing, among others. Instagram: @ kouchanyo