Brandon Shimoda
Rest House

I stayed long in the shadow of the dead

only after I left,
was gone

to a place where the dead could be
seen    strolling

a tight circle,
preparing

for the phase of being dead that is
characterized by reappearance.

was there,
the shell of your egg



Rest House

A scattered peace
like nets

the old woman gathering rose-taste

to marry
to ice cream


All around us, the breeze
corpses
overlapping

to be welcomed
to be given

the refreshment
that might stun [them]

back into
existence.



Rest House

The woman in ground zero
lays down in the grass

looks up
into the trees

at the monochrome shapes
of astrological hospice

They’re not dead yet
she says

The trees look down
unapprovingly

Are there tiny balloons in the sky?
People preparing to leap through
the bottomless

brain
of their delicate wishes?


nor will they last
long enough


Every time I see you      you are
in the grass
or behind small glass

reaching into the freezer
toward a warm body
from the journal CHANGES
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Among the things I remember about visiting Nagasaki (in 2011) was that there was a woman selling ice cream at ground zero (the atomic bomb detonation point). She had a small metal cart, a tall stack of cones, and was selling one flavor: rose water. I will never forget how, at the site where the US murdered 70,000 people in an instant, everyone was enjoying an ice cream.

Brandon Shimoda on "Rest Houses"
Diana Khoi Nguyen
Interview with Diana Khoi Nguyen

"I’m never trying to write a book per se, I’m just working on separate poems, and my poems tend to be long sequences over years. Then after a certain point – a certain number of years – I kind of realize I’ve accumulated a lot around a certain topic, and then I just print everything out. I look to see, ‘Do these gather together?’ It’s kind of like making a playlist in a sort."

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What Sparks Poetry:
Orchid Tierney on "a field guide to future flora"


"however distributed vegetal cognition is, plants are nonetheless remarkable sensing and sensate beings, who invite speculation as to who we—the weirdos of this world—are if we are not already communal thinkers. so: to look upon a plant with an appreciation that its own mind is radically different is a terse exercise in the acceptance of its unknowability."
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