Handclap
down below my spine is a little handclap,
neither a device nor a gift of chance,
I found it, one morning,
and pressed the switch (or I didn’t),
a doctor instructed
morning and evening, two times a day at most
and I’ve followed that law, at the very least
my eyes can’t mirror the whole sky
the sky mirrors my eyes instead
the wideview abandons
taking things from the past
“life hasn’t been all fun, never, ever
you’re being self-serving
the past is no more than that”
so a mouth, not mine,
bitterly, albeit matter-of-factly, asserts
uneven handclap wiggles through my body,
hushes,
and hardens like an awakening crag in a field
your convenience, your conscience,
your staining blood, its shape
are all confined in your body,
says the doctor,
needing no one’s appreciation (that’s fine),
content with those little-but-warmer-than-anything claps,
we are all, fully, alone
Hysteric Chestnuts
red fungus, spreading in dots
hidden to all, a way to warm this
afflicted fragment was still, unknown
that which slipped right out, escaped
without even a head to shake in defiance
said something like keeew, and when
I embraced it in the bathroom, the erstwhile child washed away, disintegrating
I liked the
warmth behind a ski mask
evading the neighbours’ blithe hellos
clothes lift off of skin once I turn the key
still, these waning breasts, a thin vertical twist
the spring-loaded rod by the door is made of discarded humans
like an archer’s bow, why does this wretched, jaw-displacing burst of laughter
adhere to these gestures in the night
at the store’s doorway
a furious oy! made me turn and
see, one day, a shadow run by with hysteric chestnuts
distinctly off, the way thieves run,
quick, give it to me
Sleeping Women
breathing of the sleeping women in a shared bedroom
ever unsynchronised, gradually, transforms
into conversation,
stirred air,
plays with bangs, to be
an insomniac, an outcast,
by that declaration in the dead of night
whether we’re always alone,
or, please
converse, bringing one who sleeps to the river, barefoot
to dance, to play ducks and drakes
—god forbid
and your whereabouts, ladies, have yet to be disclosed
by the Kinugawa river, whose course is gradually enclosed, shall
solidarity be brought into being, quietly, maybe
one, two, flocks of sheep have obscured our being,
so we, with guilty conscience,
have slaughtered so many of them (haven’t we?), as a dream, like a sentence
is given only once,
I’ll roll those weighty female bodies
and move them like snaking logs,
—and those faintest snores, breaking voices,
even a whispering rustle of cloth, I shall
inspect them all, for tomorrow, when
I return them to you, gentlemen
from Hemflower
Maiko Sugimoto
translated from the Japanese by Sim Yee Chiang and Sayuri Okamoto
excerpted from Susobana (Shichōsha, 2014), by permission of Maiko Sugimoto and Shichōsha
※『裾花』（思潮社、2014）より杉本真維子氏と思潮社の許可を得て掲載
Listen to "Handclap" read in the original Japanese by Sayuri Okamoto:
Hemflower was published seven years after Sugimoto’s previous collection; there was a time during that interval when she couldn’t write poetry at all. Her father had passed away and she felt that her grief made her writing too explanatory. She turned to the study of other languages because she could not stand to speak or hear Japanese while unable to produce poetry in her native tongue. Some of that struggle remains in Hemflower. The superfluity of commas, for instance, may be read as the weariness or uncertainty of a voice newly emerged from stasis.
Maiko Sugimoto (b. 1973) published her first chapbook in 1998. After receiving a degree in English from Musashino Junior College, she worked in finance while trying to write. She quit her job and went back to school to study philosophy at Gakushuin University. She received the Gendaishi Techō Prize for emerging poets in 2002, and her debut collection Tenkaki was published in 2003. Her second book Sodeguchi no dōbutsu (2007) won the Japan Poets Association’s Mr. H Prize in 2008. In 2015, she received the Takami Jun Prize for her third collection Susobana (2014), translated here as Hemflower.
Sim Yee Chiang is a contributing editor at Asymptote. He was born in Singapore, received an undergraduate education and a master's in English from Stanford University, and researched issues of English-Japanese and Japanese-English literary translation under the auspices of the University of Tokyo, where, seduced by the praxis itself, he now hopes to contribute to the exponentially growing mass that is world literature.
Sayuri Okamoto is a contributing editor at Asymptote. She holds degrees in art history and Japanese literature and works as a translator, writer, and curator. Born and raised in Shizuoka, Japan, she is currently living and working in London (UK) and Padua (Italy). In 2014, she received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant for her translation of Gozo Yoshimasu's "post-3.11" poetry series Dear Monster.
