There is a bar in Tokyo where sushi arrives on the platter of a naked woman. There is a Tokyo in sushi, microbes in microbe highrises, where the platter of a naked woman arrives on a bar in a bar named for some ridiculous fish or movie star. When Tokyo arrives, we will all hail her with our shorn chopsticks now resting on the platter of a naked woman named for some ridiculous fish or movie star. On a bar in a bar named for the city that birthed it, naked women rest on their white fainting couches waiting for Tokyo to arrive. We all hail with our movie stars and fish, puffing our ridiculous chests. Highrises rise from the ground around the bar in a bar, like naked women. Wait, they are naked women. Wait, Tokyo. Don’t go. A weight rests on my naked chest like a platter of sushi or a bad tattoo. It is the profile of you, naked, that arrives on the horizon of my chest as a constellation of freckles, or the bubbles a fish puffs on the fainting couch of a sand bar’s slow strangle, whose arrival a woman on the shore hails with her nakedknife. And if she is ridiculously hungry, her name is Tokyo.
Chad Davidson is the author of From the Fire Hills (2014), The Last Predicta (2008), and Consolation Miracle (2003), all three from Southern Illinois University Press, as well as co-author with Gregory Fraser of two textbooks, including Writing Poetry: Creative and Critical Approaches (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). His poems have appeared in Doubletake, The Paris Review, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Virginia Quarterly Review, and others. He is professor of literature and creative writing at the University of West Georgia near Atlanta and co-directs Convivio, a writing conference in Umbria, Italy. (updated 10/2017)