November afternoon is the shadow of a retired wrestler who is sitting at the table in the old kitchen. He doesn’t remember his name any more, but a thousand scars all over his skin take him to the memories of a thousand nights. The shorter the days get, the sweeter the pains grow.
Outside the window, the houses are about to lose their colors. The cats in the backstreet sit on their idleness. Some of them are suffering phantom seasickness, because they feel as if they are boarding a phantom ship. By the way, the other cats are phantoms.
Minute by minute, the evening air is shrinking into a tin pot. Until the tea leaves stop dancing in the water and lie down on the bottom of the pot, the wrestler sees a vision of distant woods silently burning behind his eyelids. When he opens his eyes, the kitchen has become darker than darkness.
Satoshi Iwai was born and lives in Kanagawa, Japan. He writes poems in English and in Japanese. His English work has appeared in Heavy Feather Review, FLAPPERHOUSE, Small Po[r]tions, Your Impossible Voice, Poetry Is Dead, and elsewhere.
