10 Years; 10 Places

 

Hamamatsu: home of unagi pie –– a biscuit made of eel. 

Iwakuni: bridge of Samurai –– beer with strangers under blossom.

Burracho’s Bar: grilled sparrow on a stick and flirtation with the ‘Master’.

Nara: home of mountain deer, warm porridgy-rice wine –– amazake.

Miajima: an island, Hiroshima oysters. More deer.

Yumigahama: a bow-shaped beach, barbequed mackerel, got engaged.

Kyoto: by taxi to Kinkakuji; driver, in white gloves, holding an umbrella for my mother. 

Fukuoka: Fu, not fuck. Karaoke till 5 a.m. and hangovers in a hot-spring.

Ryukyu: home of Awamori –– an Okinawan brew with a snake in. 

Shizuoka: ‘Still hill’, located on a fault line.

 

 

 

Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana has a Masters in Writing Poetry and spent 10 years of her life in Shizuoka, Japan. This year she is published or forthcoming in Fenland Poetry Journal, Tears in The Fence, Ink Sweat and Tears, The Ofi Press and Diamond Twig Poem of the Month. In 2019 she performed a sequence of her poems at the American Writers Program conference in Oregon.