1. Missouri
In each place called home, the lovers, the farm with blue eggs, and the calf being born. Learning that the best branches for whipping are from weeping willows. From the backyard you could see for miles, trace the lines of the fences and county, patches of snow. Trees no bigger than the tip of your finger, three counties over. Watching the wind, east side of the river, passing through that wheat field. Stand still and wait for it to come to you.
2. Desires (the consistency of guns and vulnerability and knives and recurring daydreams and your hands reaching into his warmth and pulling. Imagine).
Traced the curve of his hip and belly, I didn’t expect this, so taut and perfect. White paper parcels and stew. I wanted to be there when he was gutted, but it was the other boy’s kill and they said I was too young. It should have been me, watching him from the tree, and suddenly when he looked at me I would have shot him once, and that would have been perfect, neck would curve and bend with the shell’s impact and weight of his head, then his body would follow, and his hind legs would be the last to touch the ground. Hopefully I’d climb down the tree fast enough to feel his blood flow soft then thick, watch it pool into his ear. White parcel, I smell it deeply and run my fingers over browned blood, at my lips I taste his kill, and plan for a Ten Pointer of my own.
3. Winter. Waiting, in Gray
The trees are now brittle and frozen into the sky, delicate bones.
4. Slink
I’ll make you a necklace of baby daisies, I’ll find you a four-leaf clover, I’ll collect plastic dinosaurs in every color and leave them outside of your door. I’ll greet you with a mouthful of sugar and dissolve into your bloodstream. Palms and fingertips and fistfuls of ass, pimp me gentle, come closer and trace the veins inside of my face.
5. Mama
What fireflies do during the day. Her fingertip tracing my ear. How silkworm cocoons are boiled to kill the pupae and ease the unraveling of their single threads. Her hand reaching for me. The baby robins with their see-through skin, bobbing up and down, mouths open so wide the beginnings of their throats are visible. Wanting her, they beckon, exquisitely cry, until she comes.
6. Wait
I’ve daydreamed about catching you, holding you in my hands like the blue jay I picked up when it flew into the window. Head bobbing, mites and lice scurrying across my palms, up my arms, into my shirtsleeves. Heart thrashing in that plump breast, jerking the whole body. I’d hold you in my palms, finally, and all I would have to do is squeeze.
7. Little girl, lonely, whore, drunk, day-dreamer. Fuck off.
Almost witch nose, bird face with a couple of moles. Want a great boxing arm and more target practice, a boy in tight Levi’s, and a row of fruit trees. Wear those thigh holsters, those ivory plates, antlers carved into each handle. Offer me your ass like a cat in heat, we’ll get along well, promise, and I’ll make blueberry pie and prime rib.
8. And I had thought farms were lackluster.
The thing had just spilled out, and it was terrifying and such fun, and she was hollering and there was all that shiny brown fluid, golden almost like honey, and the purple mass fell to the ground, then we walked forward. It pulsed and twitched some, then she pulled at it with her mouth, and began licking and licking until the mass of calf uncovered itself and slowly began blinking in the light.
Sarah Matsuda revels in experimental, edgy, and juicy literature that defies the norms. A visceral and tactile hybridization of text, spinning somewhere deep within the brain to give a whole new experience of what can be defined. Sex, violence, memory, and the presence of the body are the central elements of her work. She rejects tradition and the conventional forms of literature in favor of extreme rebellion to history.