Hiromi Yoshida, 3/30/2015

Current Occupation: Academic Librarian Job Candidate; and President of the Apartment & Family Student Council, Indiana University Bloomington
Former Occupation: Reference Services Assistant, Wells Library, Indiana University Bloomington
Contact Information: Hiromi Yoshida has worked in academic libraries throughout most of her graduate student career.  Winner of multiple Indiana University Writers' Conference awards, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Clockwise Cat; The Rain, Party, & Disaster Society; Borderline; Evergreen Review; Bathtub Gin; Flying Island; and the Matrix anthologies of literary and visual arts.  She loves the smell of old books and pending rain.

 

#

Porcelain Lady

 

I remember her porcelain fragility—the way she handled her neurosis

carefully like medieval embroidery, or Ming china, her eggshell

lining skin shot through with Botox injections and other

 

kinds of invective that hadn’t been invented yet. Her alcoholic

fingers stapled photocopy askew: she couldn’t align the ruler with

her hemline to see who measured up to whom despite her giraffe

height. Thus we were caged birds of a different

 

species from each other singing shrill ditties for the supper that never

came to us at the Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Department we cohabited.

 

We wasted time on the clock begging the hairy

prince to come to us like a good Neanderthal in a silver G-string.

 

And maybe he did come for us to perform the Chippendale’s dance

behind locked doors, gyrating voyeuristic

Vaseline moves in skewed Manhattan moonlight. Yet she remains

 

for me the porcelain lady with her raucous neuroses: She gawks at me

from behind the torn lace years—mistress of bitchy vodka moods.

 

Today, I’m sorry I never knew anything

about the rain she saw behind eyelids shuttered against the storm that bothered her

when she told me about her hairy pedophilic uncle. Perhaps she

 

saw him standing in the moonglare behind

my back. At least we know he shouldn’t have reached into the pubic

spaces of her body like parks closed after Sunday dark. After all these years, perhaps we

 

can escape the ILL cage we cohabited, once upon a time when the prince came to us in

the scintillating regalia of respective desire for liberation from our father the hairy ape and the luciferian angel of antediluvian mercy and elusive catharsis.

 

And perhaps the caged birds will sing again and won’t fall

off their easy perches into narcissistic sunlight. And perhaps

 

an invective has been invented by now for Ming china, and we can dig our way to

the other side of the moon.