Wants to know where all the little girls died
But this time doesn’t ask if it hurt.

She points into an archway just in front of us,
A room, one of the few with a roof, and claims

Girls must’ve died in the back: the shadows are
Unnaturally dark, dense and hanging

My face is made of Night Crawlers
Gleaming fat and febrile
From the Iris garden
And through hot vats of dye: the world’s

The weak and the inebriated
Who slip to their deaths in

The canals do not drown. They are
Absorbed as bulbs would be

Sprouting slowly through the wash
Of time. Everyone has fallen in

At least once, petals of skin
Stretching up and over

You need something blunt
With murderous history: a tire iron,

An old one from some forgotten
Esso Station, a four-pronged, black star

Gone sticky from the oily hands
Of hard-working grease monkeys.

You need an Ash Can mechanic’s bay
That Hopper should’ve painted

                Over Mt. Fuji
                a storm, bruise

                purple, slides
                into the valley:

                in the stroller,
                daughter Asia, new

                like the sprouts
                and as confounded

                I've just contracted
                A twenty-thousand-square

                            Footer in B Hills

                So that fat comedian
                Has enough room

                            To screw as many

                Virgins as he wants.
                I'm slugging my gin, neat,

The light of Tokyo, that halo
cradling the edge of space, jars
even the heavens. By midnight
Stephen’s ghost falls.

                A wall of bamboo forest
                where the trail head was

                still leads to a cluster of stone
                tombs the size of dog houses

                next to cherry name markers
                sunk long before the big war
                and, so bright light

        Picture what they’d have done

        With my wife, Tan Yi, her narrow

        Hips, pouting lips, doll’s feet, and

        Five-thousand-year-old overbite:

        Tossing noodles, no doubt, wrapping

        Beside our daughter

        all night

        Tan Yi and I hold tiny arms steady

        to keep the IV’s in—

        her head a solar bench.

        I think about the bed across

        from ours, the infant