This Is About Time by Naoko Fujimoto

First runner-up in the 2018 Los Angeles Review Literary Awards, in the category of Poetry.

Final Judge: Douglas Manuel

Silver flowers—a blindman’s word,
give the blossom, not bullets—
of sugarcane rustled in the wind……………..sky and waves in the ocean

you know—
around the cavernous hillside, young girls stabbed their soft skin
by their shaking hands………………..there was no
choice of living through this war
with their bodies cut open…………..flies laid eggs in them
…………………….I saw in the Himeyuri Memorial when I was six
in January, after the first Gulf War just started…………………….I asked Grandmother
……………………………………………………………………………………………Have they visited Himeyuri?
and she said, they should— ………..white lilies covered the rugged entrance,
clean pavement straight to another war—

……………………………….I am thirty-five now,
drive to the supermarket and wonder how………..it is an outward peace
not knowing we are like floating lanterns
not knowing we repeat it…………………………………….again
not knowing we never left the cave;

do I kill my newborn because she cries too hard—
the loudness of “I want to live” or “I am scared”
……………………………………………………………………………………………………..suffocated

Naoko Fujimoto was born and raised in Japan. She received a B.A. and M.A. from Indiana University. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in POETRY, Kenyon Review, Seattle Review, Quarterly West, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Diode Poetry Journal, and PANK. She is the author of Glyph:Graphic Poetry=Trans. Sensory (Tupelo Press, 2020), Where I Was Born (Willow Publishing, 2019), and three chapbooks. She is an associate editor & outreach translation editor at RHINO Poetry.