I got Mao’s text around 20:00. I was sitting in a dingy bar watching boxers spar on the TV. I’ll be late, don’t wait for me. So I ordered some more wasabi peas & massaged my stiff knees. It’s always like this: it’s always Mao who’s late. Something about make-up, a facelift, a mausoleum somewhere.…

‘It was the corpses of the Koreans that remained scattered in the ruins longer than any others. One reason is that although many Japanese people survived the atomic bombing, very few Koreans survived. There was nothing we could do. Crows flew down in flocks from the sky and ate the eyeballs of the Korean corpses.…

who will carry me to saihou jodo what to bring there what to wear? take me to the top of a mountain leave something behind to forget who’ll build another kogetsudai fire my body at the silvery moon? leave something behind to forget falling into orbit & spinning space who’ll throw me into ginshadan drown…

There’s a train that’s stopped moving, in the middle of Hokkaido, in the middle of the night, in the middle of winter. The sound of a thousand snores, a thousand sleepy sighs. The rumble of a passing train. The one the driver’s waiting for. There’s a train that’s stopped moving but any minute now it’ll…

Snow globules hanging from the trees, like silvery pollen or the larvae of worms. Rice fields smothered by six months of snow, their feeder canals obliterated, the shallow stream a black slit in the hollow. Houses dwarfed by their new snow skins, train stations drowning beneath the sky’s white tears. More snow than I have…

i was born in a silence car with only her heartbeat for a drum no ringing bells or false alarms i swam through the day’s eclipses i was born in a silence car but the sounds infected my tiny ears & the world gushed into that tiny space where first i breathed and lived i…

you never did cross it but still it remains a pair of spectacles submerged in the river on one side lies the pleasure district: neon and ribbons, arc-welded limbs the scintillation distractors on the other: some home or one light that was gutted then torn down extinguished by passionate hopes between them, one heartless bridge…

cold sweats in an immigration queue i’ve everything & nothing to declare hand trembles as it pushes a passport over the ledge into the hand of fate a process designed to inspire nervous twitches/recognisable warning signs asked for evidence of forward journey (as if mere mortality were not enough then subjected to a crotch pat-down…