Ai Ogawa Poems

We smile at each other
and I lean back against the wicker couch.
How does it feel to be dead? I say.
You touch my knees with your blue fingers.
...

"Sit in my hand."
I'm ten.
I can't see him,
but I hear him breathing
...

I'm going out and get something.
I don't know what.
I don't care.
Whatever's out there, I'm going to get it.
...

Sunflowers beside the railroad tracks,
sunflowers giving back the beauty God gave you
to one lonely traveler
who spies you from a train window
...

When the rooster jumps up on the windowsill
and spreads his red-gold wings,
I wake, thinking it is the sun
...

Overhead, the match burns out,
but the chunk of ice in the back seat
keeps melting from imagined heat,
...

I didn't write Etsuko,
I sliced her open.
She was carmine inside
...

"Earth is the birth of the blues," sang Yellow Bertha,
as she chopped cotton beside Mama Rose.
It was as hot as any other summer day,
...

I scissor the stem of the red carnation
and set it in a bowl of water.
It floats the way your head would,
...

My sister rubs the doll's face in mud,
then climbs through the truck window.
She ignores me as I walk around it,
...