We started writing ‘tan-ku’ sequences and sets during the pandemic when neither of us could travel. Mariko is a tanka poet and I am a haiku poet. We started having poetic conversations via Facebook Messenger where Mariko would write a tanka and I would respond with a haiku and vice versa, often at odd hours due to the time zone differences between Tokyo and Los Angeles.
My neighbor, near me on the bus, moves his lips
while looking at his phone. They’re like two
little birds whispering to that tiny sunrise he holds.
He kept a rum bottle on the mahogany desk. All day, the rhythm, like calibrated pistons pumping, as the Victrola blasted Ravel’s Bolero, while the white curtains rippled from the window facing a plantain grove.
Turn the photo of your mother in its frame
so she can’t tsk her tongue against her teeth:
the cold eyes will follow you just the same—
a trick of perspective like Mona Lisa’s gaze.
At the end of the work day
you could tell exactly how far you had gotten
and how much farther you had to go.
Today they’re recruiting for the Corps of the Undead;
in fetid cubicles they anticipate more dead.