Nancy is an Alleyway

Nagasaki

I

asymmetrically

waiting for the weld to hold it was supposed to be a stanza unfiltered language loose hipped and bourbon rich leaning on a wall paint flaking onto its shoulders like rain like old September like Nancy when she cracked her skull against the wall

Sasebo

handing off the baton

the wall sighed and stuck between her teeth it became her even the air vents cackled into the

sweaty breath of Peri Peri Chicken Dreams or DreamZ as the sign said in slow lazy neon tattooing

light into rusty drainpipes moss on their lips

Saga

letting go of gone

dripping the sweat of twenty bathrooms into one small metal square in the ground with half a

peppermint pressed into the grooves she was propaganda she was every corner

Kumamoto

beginning to give

she became it’s bricks and mortar as if she was nothing or a part of everything people died in

alleyways people had always died in alleyways but she became the alleyway she became the trash

can the tarmac the drainpipe the graffiti

Minamata

you

your open hand behind you

the piss the cigarette butt the fox at 4am she was a wasteland watching restaurants close The Slow 

Grasshopper sent their last few diners home

Kagoshima

threading the air
it's infinite axes

minimum wage baristas dragged rubbish outside piling empty barrels into short fat columns building 

their own kind of Acropolis out of draught ale and empty pitchers sound of broken glass spilling on

her thighs as bin bags tore discarding fragments of time

Miyazaki

blind transfer

dark bathroom windows with lucky cats waving their paws like grandfather clocks in abstract

meditation

Nobeoka

keeping the pace

or stuck somehow between movement and thought repetition imploring jagged recitation

Ōita

breaking out

it grew through her toes and what she imagined was her mouth why should her body fit together the

way it had before

Kitakyushu

on the backstretch

now it could build itself it was its own architect her elbows were a fire escape she spilled her fingers

into shadows into light into the dawn

Fukuoka

qualifying distance

alphabets climbed into trash cans into crisp packets into milk carton crud into dirt into the pulse of

everything that is not Nancy and the rain beat against her