By Satoshi Iwai

Don’t tell me anything about rainbows, because every rainbow belongs to someone else’s summer. All I have is one afternoon and seven cigarette burns on my bare stomach. Hundreds of cumulus clouds are born in my left eye, dying in my right eye. The names of all clouds are the same. Weariness. I can’t stop envying a chrysalis which doesn’t worry about whether its wings will be black or white. I can’t stop keeping a dream diary in advance. In tomorrow’s dream, I am a brand-new carpet bag which is left in an old bus abandoned in the fields. The pain-free angels never come here. They all had already driven away to the beach. Flying from flowers to flowers, butterflies are absorbed in promiscuity. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. I take the eighth cigarette in my nickel mouth. Too long weariness smells like leaking oil.


Satoshi Iwai was born and lives in Kanagawa, Japan. He writes poems in English and in Japanese. His English work has appeared in RHINO, Small Po[r]tions, Barrow Street, and Poetry Is Dead.

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