IKIGAI ___________ FORREST AGUAR A C O L L A B O R AT I O N W I T H 1 0 W R I T E R S
IKIGAI : FORREST AGUAR Ikigai is a Japanese concept that means “a reason for being.” Everyone is considered to have one, but it is only through a deep and lengthy search of self that it can be found.
2013
IKIGAI FORREST AGUAR
A COLLABORATION WITH TEN WRITERS : Rachel Schapira, Julia Stacy, Devin Cox, Darin Beasley, James Watson, Ashur Rayis, Vivian Prosper Mcgill Hedges, Rosalee Bernabe, Maggie Benoit, Jospeh Luc Weatherby
Order The air the hair the sir. The machinery come come a-a-on. Come down since I’ve forgotten how to read And how to keep myself to order memory and dead relations. In the highest order, I’ve forgotten what I am called by A name crawls through the gears of my bones-in-time, gone-in-time cross section of a box of cogs I found in the creek and sawed open with a rock it took days and when I got it apart it was full of caddis flies dressed in silk, rusty springs and clockwork like little tractors left at the edge of the field forever. pull up a parsnip-smelling root as I stand I think I’ll choose a parsnip heart over a tractor heart. I’m calling myself in out of the yard I’m calling myself out of a mosquito into dinner someone is getting open heart-in-time surgery. On my way up to the house I look up and hear them saying so out of the sky. Behind my eyelids a heart is beating and I watch it cut into petals like a vegetable rose. Names without gender or sex make my valves flutter Breathing their cold smell, crisp with creek water. Insects sew them in with silk and go swimming. Breathing in rusty names and spice names. Unbury and inhale them. Answer to the air. Rachel Schapira
Turn The morning air had barely tasted the sweet spill of your breath and daylight’s sharp edge had not yet honed your sleep skin’s form. With bones still supple from dream’s wake, your body forged hieroglyphs in bed sheet wrinkles, meanings I cannot glean through memory’s fogged glass. They remain branded in the dough of my back and shoulders, scars to echo the melodies you hummed to fill our silent waking hours. Yet it’s in this quiet moment, before you have woken, that your image moves me most. Now I see the clarity you offered in the fine creases of your hands: No secret alchemy of dreams and language spurred the simple turn you took away from me, unsettling as the shift of Earth’s elbow at dawn. You showed me the grace of goodbye in the slackened grasp of your tender fist.
Julia Stacy
The Weightless Man From in the trees I listened to the crunch crunch underneath a grown man’s feet, a walk that was silent, according to the grown man. “Oh, how lifeless I have been. How tedious and somber a flight I have made through the dark woods, away from brilliant love.” As I saw him wander from high in the branches my eagle eyes were quick to question and to criticize. Were the pricks of pins of dead twigs and pine needles some kind of penance in a mind clearly clouded by regret? Such hopelessness in this increasing distance between the weightless man and memories of happiness.
Devin Cox
Your Mouth How many did you take today? About seven, yeah, seven so far. I like lots of pills. Maybe you were in Paris or Seville when I was there and there but it seems unlikely. I didn’t know you yet and wouldn’t first meet you for some time. We get together. I think about us fucking but we aren’t fucking, we are the same. There are two of me and two of you and we all look alike and we go riding motorcycles. The country is quiet as if someone wants to kill us. Let’s go back to the house. I want martinis. I’m thirsty. I’m so thirsty, babe. It feels like we’ve been awake forever. {Door, open , +.} Come here. No, come over here. Yeah. Bite me on the arm like that. Wait a minute. {At the kitchen sink I run the tap and make a glass of water. My heart is jumping in water somewhere next to my lungs.} I’m going to bite you. {Looking at you now. Falling into Olympic pool.} Here comes the water, James. I’m coming.
Darin Beasley
We’ve Had Enough Winter never feels different. Never. It never feels different from the winter before and it never feels different from the spring and summer [It’s all very similar, anyhow]. Getting out of the shower at six forty five in the morning—never sure if it is really hot or really cold in the apartment is quite the confused moment. The winter can never be warm enough and the summer has never seen enough cool air—be it in the trees or in the rumbling window unit. We’ve all tried; hands on face, rubbing eyes and mouth, switching between shivering or fuming— depending on the season. We’ve all tried; coffee, either iced or steaming, on the way to the train or the bus or the car, adjusting the stocking cap or snapback on top of our frustrating haircut. Baseball, basketball, football, hockey—who even can tell the difference? All the girls are dressed down and the boys are too busy to notice. Constantly. We’ve all tried; to pay enough attention to anything but we can’t. We’re inside a building hiding from what’s out there—and it’s probably not even that scary. No snowfall could ruin our days and no ninety-degree afternoon could make them any better [Or maybe it’s the other way around]. We almost forgot, though. And this one is crucial. How did we almost forget? Almost. We almost forgot that we still get autumn. We can’t take it anymore. Summer fucking sucks. It never feels different.
James Watson
Shade We heard there was a monument here kept in the shell of an older life. Hunting hungrily through the attic and earth warm cellar and the floors between heaps of dry hickory dust, cracking board of walls somehow bone cold. Maybe a tired feeling lived here now, we slowed for our sweat to cool and eyes to rest in shadows and in that soft way we found it right where it should be. “Hey, that looks like me,” I thought. Or maybe, “Hey, that looks like time,” reaching for the other time where no one lives. My friend, the one standing near me made a gesture, as if pitched toward a mantle, edges of what the monument was and wasn’t, what a tableau: my friend headlong into time reaching to the other time, inching closer to a non image. I made to grab hold of something but slid and fell we both fell and after falling left the shade stepping on our own toes as we went wondering, how we had chiseled so much out of nothing. Ashur Rayis
to e M The heart of her is in there, the place that awaits unveiling. Is that it? Or is this? Perhaps the veil unveils itself. --Your words like playthings. Like a child who dresses up as something she’s not, playing a game that’s not real. At a red light I wrote to you. But where are you? I see you, but there’s a shield that distances your heart from mine. Seeing you felt like seeing an old lover. There’s the realization, that it’s not what it was, and there’s no going back.
Nothing that makes me want to hear you. Nothing that makes me feel anything has changed between us. Nothing that’s something. Anything that lets me see you. The words we exchange, a blanket of white noise. Ammunition from a gun that’s not known. Not seen, at least. Our terminology a device of the paralytic insanity we encounter, you and I. Because you can’t step out of your cosmo of disguise. and I can’t step in. For fear of the jolting shock that would surge through the muscle that pumps inside my chest – the organ that I’ve been working so hard to revive. To dilate with blood.
All the while, you stay. And I’m not sorry for missing you. And are these arms mine, or are they yours? Does the gesture give or does it take? And are these arms for you, or are they for me? And I’m not sorry for missing you. Your false shelter is not my home. You seem hollow, a ghost of the you that’s in you. And now I am three, On-looking, sitting-in, observing. But does this make me, me?
To live again. Hearing you, like welcoming a laser gun to the head. I feel numb as the twitch of your broken record dulls my ear drum. The noise billows out. The shock, a wave that makes it hard to interpret one word from the next. Your language gets swallowed up. And I can’t distinguish what you are saying. And it doesn’t matter because you are saying nothing.
Maggie Benoit
So you stay on your side. And I’ll stay on mine. And with our defenses we shall – together – go our separate ways. Because I can’t go back to the place you can’t seem to leave. And maybe someday I’ll see you on the other side. For now, I am going where I am going. I am going where I must go.
Is this what we’ve become? Strangers. Stranger still. More strange than before. You and I, we, are estranged. Is that it? Or is this? I am not your doll. And I’m no longer your plaything.
Red Night Mosquitoes drift laggardly on nights like this— blown up like balloons, they glide in a stupor, dragging paper-thin wings through the pregnant air. My neck is damp with summer and it itches gently— with the kind of summer where sheets stick to your skin with the kind of urgency you only see in airports at funerals at drive-in movie theaters. We used to tell each other stories, remember? about cebu and winged figures shape shifting at night, those self-separators, with prehensile tongues that stretch Through the cracks in the ceiling and inch softly through the darkness to pierce swollen bellies— they could love the heart out of any wild thing. A steady beating on the roof pulls me out of my bed. i had these dreams as a kid where i’d drag my feet through valleys of stale linen, i’d climb white mountains Dotted with the blood of winged parasites. i fumble through the front door inhaling the scent of july, it is heavy like sap, And the rain smoothes over me the way hands do as i think of your mouth blooming wide like a catchfly.
Rosalee Bernabe
Kellys At 24, they are recently fallen debutantes or enrolled Sarah Lawrence students, flitting from an alcoholic’s mansion to a Brazilian’s bed. They are called Kelly. Volvo glass in my grandmother’s face, an au pair’s hand guides my mother. Where is she now, the nanny who I have only known in this anecdote? I imagine her. Mousy, maybe a feminist, hired by Robinette, my grandmother’s beetle-haired partner from the Okefenokee swamp. Do you think she remembers summer screams, taking my mother for ice cream. Taking my ice cream for mother. I assign her a name, Maggie, and envision her dating a ticket-doler from a midtown movie theatre. Maggie isn’t fooled by the obscure film selection. His pimples still smell like popcorn. Kelly’s waists are not two feet around. Three hands, tops. Two, if they’re men’s. And she has beautiful jaws and hazel eyes and Tennessee laughter. Chattanooga sirens on Crete. Robinette studies women’s friendships, how only they subvert the klan, choose a platonic love, take resources from the family doctor for another loom weaver’s abortion (I do not know if they had looms). Nancy is my Nana, and she charts the stars. My mother who is five runs around, feral except when they turn from the front seat and ask her how to get home, the first time they have driven anywhere in Seville. If my grandmother had not temporarily forsaken dick, would the nanny have borrowed it during the hospital nights? Let the Daddy soil her yellow dress, with a seam attractively bisecting areolae and running along a tapered torso? Four nipples under her dress, four between the two Kellys. Six on each of the five cats they brought home from Greece, 30 total. They have either two men’s or three women’s hands above biscuit hips. Both like to sprinkle pepper in the eyes of lovers, like Puck. To induce manic swoons. But then one day they wake up, parade of pepper-eyed lovers washed away from their own ocular provocations and now they sleep irregular hours. But then one day they wake up, parade of pepper-eyed lovers washed away from their own ocular provocations and now they sleep irregular hours.
Vivian Prosper Mcgill Hedges
Plasmid High up Deliquescent first impressions left with residual bad apple compounds pectin bound jelly rubberized soupbrain -ed comedown dumbfounded diluted sutras sutured with loofa fibers in an attempt to come clean syncretic piecemeal mosaic potatohead II:as IN s RI s ex-pire :II
Jospeh Luc Weatherby
IKIGAI is a collaborative project between the photographer and writer. A photograph was shared with each contributer uniquely as a prompt for the creative writings.