Listen to Jen Jabaily-Blackburn read her piece:
(Hiroshige, from 100 Views of Edo, 1857)
A black-pine torch crackles, heavy
between my teeth.
These were hands I’m running on,
tender & quick under the year’s last
ink-stroked sky.
It ought to feel like punishment,
hunching like this—
under the sharp scents
of slaver & sweat,
when the tree’s black branches quiver,
filling the night with words: the names
of men, whose lives
I must rearrange. When I wake, I wake
to my husband tapping my leg,
as if to say love,
enough with this shit—
the taut clockwork
of crying myself awake, & my voice
always slipping around
half-explanations of where I’ve been.
There’s a moon beyond the frame, I tell him,
though it’s more—
its lowness, dangling like a round rabbit,
the warmth of a hundred foxes, each drawn
between a desire to drop
her torch, set off the tindery field & hide
the fat moon in her jaws—
& the bell-clear need
to press on. He sinks
back down to sleep. I give what I can give.