My soul mates
Have yet to be conceived
Underneath the mating
Of surrogate spirits vacating bodies
By the minute
Directed
To live by, but I
Want to live
By the future
Ordure
I want to eat it I want to feed it
A pool-like visage
On the crumpling horizon
Synthesized from what was being
Said or done or done or said
And what I do
Not know
I think about
The trash
That captivates
The critical essence of soul mates
Heaven for a body that never starves
Is always starving Drain the trash?
Fated to be
Ballast for the mass
The trash must gleam
In the middle of the desert
__________________________________
From The Desert. Used by permission of The Song Cave. Copyright © 2018 by Brandon Shimoda.
Brandon Shimoda
Brandon Shimoda is a yonsei poet/writer, and the author of several books, most recently The Grave on the Wall (City Lights, 2019), which received the PEN Open Book Award. He has two books forthcoming: Hydra Medusa (Nightboat Books, 2023) and a book on the afterlife of Japanese American incarceration (City Lights, 2024), which received a Creative Nonfiction grant from the Whiting Foundation.
