This month, again with the help of my partner's mother (a Nikkei artist born and raised in Peru), I came to appreciate this poem for its intensity, written by Lima, Peru-based Nikkei poet José Natsuhara. Strong imagery abounds throughout this poem, full of impressive images, from the everyday to a supernatural coming of age... A poem on the attack. Enjoy...
—traci kato-kiriyama
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José Natsuhara is a Nikkei poet from Lima, Peru, director of the poetry and humanities platform Tríada Primate . He is director of the Total Collection of Peruvian Poetry: Map of Peru . Chief Curator at PRIMERA LÍNEA: Curated Catalog of International Poetry . And gallerist at GASB: Sam Bellamy Art Gallery. He hosts the programs Podcast Primate, PIENSAPRIMATE and Al Aboraje!. He has studied Philosophy, has specializations in Electrotechnics and British English, and is currently studying Psychology. He is a professor of aesthetic philosophy at the Isla Tortuga Educational Interzone and director of Filoso: Avant-garde Philosophy Colloquium. He has published: The magazine Monologue (2009), the magazine Primate (2017-current), the fanzine a-ISLA(miento) (2020-current), and the collections of poems Oh! Shotgun-Head God (second edition, 2020) and La Guerrilla Elegante (second edition, 2020). His work has been published in Bolivia in the personal anthology Metaphysical keys that open unsuspected legs (2018).
I WAS BORN & CAN BE MENTIONED IN THE STORY OF THE WAVES
I was born & can be mentioned in the story of the waves
that I am continually born, angry & hairy:
a crashed panther airplane,
a silver gym of the mind,
a child summoned today by The Presence.
An army of poems on the attack.
& I'm not ashamed to see
& see towards the beaches of Chorrillos (the turgor
meat villager)
the sun wetting my hands still green & narcotic,
waiting for zupay & candelario in a cocoon
rubbing breezes
of hate in amancaes: the caress of girls' freckles
&
the first teeth that move from mouth to mouth
until you find the direction of the kicks.
I shudder holy & dirty.
& I dedicate the reinterpretation of my childhood that is an Opus
to trees & lianas of electrical constitution,
to the poles, to the breakage of lenses & Moroccan transistors,
to the magnificent aloe vera that cured
my asthma attacks
I dedicate my conscious & pearly gaze
& I sit washing my throat of shirts on a rock
magma
upon which one's parents arrive
to invent gunpowder & the musical cadence of the mornings.
I offer you these lungs not yet adapted
to breathe the dust
of which everything
die & bloom
& sparkles
the Japanese ideograms of the singing grandparents,
a DNA that exposes the background of the spotlights
& from my look: a soul,
a malice that spreads & is not malice:
It's a rocket ship,
angel feather bursting the sun.
*This poem is the intellectual property of José Natsuhara (2022)
© 2022 José Natsuhara
