Some Girls Walk into the Country They Are From - Tapa blanda

Acerca del autor

Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation – separately and in various combinations. She has lived mostly in the US and Japan, briefly in France and China, and translates from Japanese. Her books include Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From (forthcoming, Wave Books), Pink Waves (forthcoming, Omnidawn), The Ants (Les Figues Press), and the translation of The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Canarium Books), as well as Mouth: Eats Color – Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations, & Originals (reprint forthcoming, Wave Books), a multilingual work of both original and translated poetry. She is co-editor, with Eric Selland, of an anthology of 20th Century Japanese Poetry (forthcoming, New Directions). She teaches at Brown University.

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GIRL SOUP

I get tired of being the one to make all the decisions so when they ask me where I want to eat, I say that I don’t care, I’d eat anything at this point. Next thing I know, I am face to face with a bowl of Girl Soup and I just can’t bring myself. Some of us at the table are in a hurry to eat the soup, they are specifically trying to eat the girls quickly because they seem to know that if you wait too long they turn into cyborgs or robots, and those are harder to chew. I can see that some of the girls are still alive and perhaps would like to be extracted from the soup, but when I squint I see that there are girls all over the floor with varying amounts of soup clinging to their clothes (you didn’t think they were naked, did you?) and so there goes that idea. Just at the moment I think I am running out of options, something comes over me and I take a deep breath and I do it, I jump right in there, that bowl of Girl Soup, no one is checking IDs or questioning my size or gender or race or voter affiliation, and I quick round up all the girls in the bowl into a large huddle. We have now obliterated two major problems: huddled together we are too large to eat, and also we’ve taken care of the problem of the eater.

UNDER THE CONDITIONS OF SENDING A WARM THING BY SPOON

When asked who wants to ride, sometimes all the girls start jumping up and down, other times they duck, cover, and conceal. In the be- ginning it was all the moms: Girl D, Girl E, Girl G, Girl H, Girl I, and Girl J. Many of the girls were moms a er all, and even the girls who are not yet moms have been carrying their potential children in their ovaries from the time they were 20-week-old fetuses inside their own mothers, which is why when Girl B hugs her maternal grandmother, it’s just the other side of her own so skin. When Girl J marries a gay man, he repeatedly says, I’m gay, you know I’m gay, right? Girl J says of course, don’t forget all the times I’ve been cruising with you. And there goes the warm thing. Will you be my spoon, forever and ever.