Status Updates From The Narrow Road to the Inte...

it was getting better cuz she was lezzing out but now we’re just talking about 9/11.

idk man i just don’t really care about this ladies divorce. i need to find something to like about it though cuz she’s visiting my class next week…i mean the language is really nice? i just don’t really gaf about the subject matter?

"Conspiring with Shikishi
tanka inspired by Shikishi and her predecessors"

[This form is lovely and totally worth borrowing - the tanka Shikishi is referencing, then Shikishi's tanka, then a sequence of different tanka responses of Hahn's. The multiple responses gives the form some useful looseness; I think a strict three in every set would be too stiff, put too much weight on Hahn's.]

"Starting a Zuihitsu on _Eyebrows_ and Discovering _Cocoon_"

[I thought the 9/11 stuff brought me back - but holy smokes the image of pencil-thin eyebrow arches is a time machine]

How to defend ourselves and _not_ plunge into war? Would silence or inaction be a defense of, say--stoning women? [...] Of executing adulteresses, amputating a thief's hand, denying a girl's education, denying a woman's medical care?

[it is wild to watch the paroxysms of paranoia and propaganda of those weeks ripple through these poems - the sudden shock of islamophobia and jingoism and soulless blind patriotism]

Once an afternoon for groceries, it is still an afternoon for groceries--and a fear once called _the bridge, the stray suitcase, the rental truck parked too long on the corner._

[9/11 comes out of nowhere in this collection - of course it does, in imitation of a diary. A striking contrast to Shonagon, where the tragedies are deep in the subtext. I both relate to this material more and it seems infinitely distant.]

Do I know how to slow-dance with a woman? Who would lead?

[sort of wild how this poem criticizes men for weirdly fetishizing queer women while the poet is weirdly fetishizing queer women. maybe this is the point?]

Rolls of waves off Wellfleet. This could be Maui. I could be my mother.

The diction from a vivisection text is so pure.

(What his best friend told me he said)
_She thinks I found pleasure but I was as present as I was able._

It is lovely when a fragment can be a whole. Not just suggest entirety.
(Or can it?)
Where will she cut? And how much is aggressive?