Ai Ogawa Poems

We smile at each other
and I lean back against the wicker couch.
How does it feel to be dead? I say.
You touch my knees with your blue fingers.
...

"Sit in my hand."
I'm ten.
I can't see him,
but I hear him breathing
...

I'm going out and get something.
I don't know what.
I don't care.
Whatever's out there, I'm going to get it.
...

Sunflowers beside the railroad tracks,
sunflowers giving back the beauty God gave you
to one lonely traveler
who spies you from a train window
...

When the rooster jumps up on the windowsill
and spreads his red-gold wings,
I wake, thinking it is the sun
...

Overhead, the match burns out,
but the chunk of ice in the back seat
keeps melting from imagined heat,
...

I didn't write Etsuko,
I sliced her open.
She was carmine inside
...

I scissor the stem of the red carnation
and set it in a bowl of water.
It floats the way your head would,
...

My sister rubs the doll's face in mud,
then climbs through the truck window.
She ignores me as I walk around it,
...

Today it rained vengefully and hard
and my men deserted me.
...