Brandon Shimoda
Brandon Shimoda's recent books are Hydra Medusa (Nightboat Books, 2023) and The Grave on the Wall (City Lights, 2019), which received the PEN Open Book Award. He lives in the US; his front door faces a mountain.
The Hour of the Rat
Maybe we were fish were fish
Maybe the two magnolia trees
watching us through the glass
were eggs Maybe
buds pink blood
or beaks
detached from shark-eyed birds
lustrous with milk
on the hospital’s rain wet roof
wooden b r i g s
beneath
magnolia trees
A little girl appeared
to contemplate
the dragonflies
Maybe the little girl was a reflection of the TV
in the laboring room
Maybe The magnolia trees fielded lightning
Nurses
The Hour of the Rat
The magnolia tree produces insulin
Every leaf is a mirror
that produces a face That grows into itself
All ancestors pass through
a window Their shadows
mark
the light across
levels of discomfort
Not that the face is autonomous bodiless,
without struggles
the decadence of the breakdown of bodies
in archaic salute to their souls
Bodies falling down shafts of light
and destruction
tuck their legs like
flamingos
The Hour of the Rat
A child is made
by taking a mask down
off the wall
and holding it
beneath ,
the waterfall,
shadows the mask bends
inside
the sound
that bands a person, personality
in flesh
old enough
to begin making
a mask was the child bewitched
Earth expelled
to cover the error
into which we are born, unknowing
now
the waterfall is concentrated,
The Hour of the Rat
The sound jellyfish make at night
along the seawall
to the surface
The jellyfish rose
to the surface
to spy the colors of the pumpkin (Kusama)
then recede
into the casino,
The jellyfish were coins in
a fountain a momentary abridgment
of an interminable fantasy.
puce huge
and sparkling
commemorating
the lives of people torn apart
by panels of each planet
The Hour of the Rat
The reason fruit exists
is not fruits function, or what it does
fruit quadruples
in proportion
to the attention [ ] receives
its youngest visitors wonder
what as opposed to why
does it exist
commemorates a recklessness
The Hour of the Rat
A face becomes a throat
inside out
an anus shuttle
s through
a star
fish the starfish
clings to
The Hour of the Rat
Rain
fell
through the roots of
the room
activated
a new order of hell
The Hour of the Rat
Where does the river go,
when the rain lifts
when the dream is halved
and dispersed
and the mouth is yellow
tasting yesterday’s tables?
The river is drawn
into a pearl
the pearl is the eye of the sun. the sun
enhances its arsenal, aims,
more illustrious, In other words
languages
ancestral sentencings
The Hour of the Rat
Maybe this is your river, Lisa said
as we drove through a large puddle
Every moment felt like a phase,
every phase was eternal
Building a society crossing a puddle
The person left to imagine
existence
as permanence
in each phase
The water sloshed climbed
up the carriage
Because there is sewage
We could not see ourselves in
the river No matter
how far we leaned over
clouds formed on the lip of each wave,
Maybe fish swam through us,
maybe The river was melting,
on the outside of an industrial wasteland.
we walked to the center of
the bridge
The Hour of the Rat
I was on an abandoned cruise.
being carried
very fast,
on a long, flat wave,
to shore.
It crashed into the ruins of an ancient staircase.
I was thrown onto the stairs.
The sun was salt. the moon was
gilding The ship
was destroyed.
I would have to climb up. alone
Lianas were dangling. a scalp
in the fog.
My daughter was a squirrel skeleton
heart on the outside