essays | fiction | poetry | photography | art
I see you standing there – starch white lungi draped
7AM freshly shaved – wooden spoon in hand
Commanding your caramelising populace.
one bright red strawberry on the strawberry plant
mist still low, tangled in the branches of olive trees
the way the pomegranates hang low
with the burden of their own weight
Faces are remembered, words spoken; that brief encounter at the fair, the smell of old sunlight, a slow night train.
There was something very claustrophobic about being in Nigeria. Nigeria gagged its people. Nigeria strangled people’s voices. People were often afraid to speak out. People were always afraid for no reason, and so being in Nigeria was the last thing you wanted to do. You wanted to move out of Nigeria. If that would not be possible, then you wanted to connect with people who were not Nigerians. You wanted to know more about the world. You wanted to move into the real world. You wanted your mindset to morph from Nigeria to The World.
On a sunny September day in the early 1990s, a German couple taking a shortcut through the rock spires on the Austrian-Italian border spotted the head and back of a man jutting from a patch of half-melted ice. The couple, thinking they’d stumbled across the corpse of a mountaineer, told the owner of the inn they were staying at. He, in turn, contacted the authorities, who sent a forensic investigator.
You’ve probably never noticed them. Their red and white box usually sits well below their thick-cut, smoked, and maple-flavored cousins in their clear ‘look at me!’ packaging. Or, sometimes, Ends and Pieces aren’t displayed at all, and you have to ask the butcher for them. Because mind you, they are the ends and pieces, the leftovers, the scraps. Who would want them?
My mom, that’s who.
How she longs for the asteroid to come, to show them how little they controlled anything.
Reuniting with translator Polly Barton, Matsuda revisits similar themes in this new collection; across fifty-two stories, she tackles the pervasive misogyny faced by women in contemporary Japan and beyond.
Desire could drain a reservoir. Fear could empty a playground. And someone like her would be left to label the files.
The past peels me off like red pared down to
parent rock (think barn, cadaver, three-wheeled
wagon upended in the bee garden).
My hand slips—crushed pepper
fills the pot, the water is boiling
not simmering as you said, you said
I needed to be careful, but look now
“We are prompted to savour each word, carefully probing between our teeth to discover new morsels of meaning.”
