from “Pink Waves”

5

it was a wave, it was infectious

an occasional moment reveals nothing but a passing light

extent to which i breathe your facts

it’s haptic; it’s your membrane; it’s material clatter

sliding between your stargazing hoax and flesh

and then somebody steals your wild you

and names it

after a sharp thought

a quiet neck is often indifferent to the mismeasured noise of the world 

substrata lower than the territory concedes

sharp pointed arrows indicate the lack of an end

simulated spacial deadline

a hip, stigmata, shake

she was a threnody hit; she happened; she pitched 

i did love it

geometry of pleasure

Copyright © 2022 by Sawako Nakayasu. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 14, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“This is an excerpt from a book-length poem, Pink Waves. I wrote it on stage in a durational performance, where it became a mode with which I might reckon with various elements of complicated grief. Each numbered section accrues and develops lines from the previous one; this one is the fifth section in the third and final part of the book. Even when extracted from its larger context, the lines still reflect the themes of the whole: attenuated touch; the finite and slippery edges of time; a reaching towards sensory pleasure, peace, unboundedness—speaking through the residue of that which is lost.”
—Sawako Nakayasu