Congratulations to our Best of the Net-nominated poets! Our nominees are:
Laura Cherry, “Fairy Tale” (17 – 4)
Carmen Germain, “Wild Mind” (17 – 4)
Ben Debus “So We Pooled Our Money and Went All of Us in a Car East towards Appalachia” (18 – 1)
Yuko Taniguchi, “A Child Hibakusha” (18 – 1)
Tina Richardson, “Insomnia” (18 -1)
Christopher Petruccelli, “Verdigris” (18 – 2)
Best of luck to you all!
Cider Press Review, Volume 18, Issue 1, is now online. Enjoy new poems by Maria Sanz (translated by Lola Hidalgo-Calle and Mark Putnam), Tim Cresswell, M.K. Foster, Colin Schmidt, Yehoshua November, LeRoy Sorensen, Yuko Taniguchi, Ben Debus, Mary Moore, Elijah Burrell, Charles Harper Webb, Amorak Huey, Allison Joseph, Cassandra Cleghorn, Jennifer Highland, Danielle Mitchell, Michael Hurley, Judy Kronenefeld, Amanda Doster, Laurie Klein, Daryl Jones, T.J. Sandella, Janet Hagelgans, Doug Ramspeck, Jennifer Bullis, Tina Richardson, Lynn Schmeidler. With reviews of Ada Limon and Kristina Marie Darling by Dave Seter and Donna Vorreyer.
−Hiroshima 1946
My mother
When my hair began falling out, my mother got down on her knees and picked up one hair at a time. My hair was everywhere- under the hospital bed, inside my sleeves, on the white wall.
My mother would sweep the floor, press my hair into a black ball between her hands
and put it inside her apron’s pocket. Even after I became bald, the hairs continued to well up
like spring water in the mountain. When the wind came through the window,
my hairs moved like worms on the wet ground. This morning, my hair was inside my mother’s
noodle soup. She filled her mouth with my hair and noodles and
swallowed them all at once.
My brother
My brother pushed my swing, and I went up high.
When I came down and passed him, he said he could see the top
of my head, bare, full, and smooth like the belly
of a pregnant woman.
My grandmother
Thousands of pieces
of glass flew into my grandmother’s head
like bees into a hive.
After she lost all of her hair, she died.
Inside the coffin, my grandmother’s head shone
as if the stars were buried underneath her skin.
My river
River, I’m going to die soon. My grandmother, Cousin Toshi and Mrs. Kamata in the next village all died when they lost their hair.
You keep moving onto the next village, to the ocean and to the rivers in another country.
It would take you one hundred years to come back to Hiroshima again.
You won’t find a bald girl like me.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 18, Issue 1.
Yuko Taniguchi’s first volume of poetry, Foreign Wife Elegy, was published by Coffee House Press in 2004. Her first novel, The Ocean in the Closet, was published by Coffee House Press in 2007. Yuko Taniguchi is an instructor of Writing in the Center for Learning Innovation at the University of Minnesota Rochester. She earned an M.F.A. at the University of Minnesota.
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