Girl Soup

I get tired of being the one to make all the decisions so when they ask me where I want to eat, I say that I don’t care, I’d eat anything at this point. Next thing I know, I am face to face with a bowl of Girl Soup and I just can’t bring myself. Some of us at the table are in a hurry to eat the soup, they are specifically trying to eat the
 girls quickly because they seem to know that if you wait too long they turn into cyborgs or robots, and those are harder to chew. I can see that some of the girls are still alive and perhaps would like to be extracted from the soup, but when I squint I see that there are girls all over the floor with varying amounts of soup clinging to their clothes (you didn’t think they were naked, did you?) and so there goes that idea. Just at the moment I think I am running out of options, something comes over me and I take a deep breath and I do it, I jump right in there, that bowl of Girl Soup, no one is checking IDs or questioning my size or gender or race or voter affiliation, and I quick round up all the girls in the bowl into a large huddle. We have now obliterated two major problems: huddled together we are too large to eat, and also we’ve taken care of the problem of the eater.

Sawako Nakayasu

Born in Yokohama, Japan, poet and translator who moved to the U.S. at age six and earned an MFA from Brown University. Her work slips between genres and languages, often experimenting with “unfaithful” translations as a way of reimagining truth in poetry.

She is the author of several collections, including Some Girls Walk into the Country They Are From (2020), The Ants (2014), and So We Have Been Given Time Or (2004), winner of the Verse Prize. Her hybrid book Mouth: Eats Color (2011) was the first title from Rogue Factorial, the press she founded.

As a translator, Nakayasu has brought Japanese writers such as Tatsumi Hijikata, Sagawa Chika, Kawata Ayane, and Takashi Hiraide into English, earning a PEN Translation Fund Award. Her own poetry has been translated into multiple languages.

Nakayasu has received an NEA fellowship and divides her time between the U.S. and Japan.