NORA HIKARI —
AN ORAL HISTORY OF HOPE
after Never Angeline Nørth
Two monster girls give each other
back rubs in the back of a Toyota Camry.
Two monster girls have never seen
each other or anyone like themselves
and email back and forth pitch-shifted
self portraits of hacksaws.
Two monster girls upload a PDF to
MonstersPlace.com about how to
biohack survival using common toiletries and
uncircumcised hypodermic needles.
Monster girls know rituals; old magic;
blood sigils and mystic text study
and autostigmata; there's a way to get there
if you have a knife and conviction.
Cost of admission: a precious burden.
Most girls offer an organ. A flap of skin.
Tendons plucked from gently unbound wrists.
Every monster girl spends her life accumulating
rituals and spells to bring about the end of time.
This is what all her wishes are, at their core.
"One day we'll be together,"
every single atrocity says to every other.
"One day I'll be real and you can touch
me in realspace." It's a convergent prayer,
independently developed across time and
space, in the thick throatfolds of every
monmusume. We just want to be born. We're
just tired of waiting to be real.
The prophecy reads: one day,
the sun will explode, or a nuclear apocalypse
will bless the treeline, or mother Poseidon
will consider us too bashful and take us home.
In that world, there isn't left handed or right
handed, there aren't values to solve for like "X"
or "Y," there aren't even people left.
Only monsters, turned loud and uncountable,
unhung from starskies and pulled from the sea.
Every imaginary girl, turned bloodshed real,
every girl who ever wanted to scream "I want
to burn it all down,"
BETWEEN WATER AND LIGHT
(A found poem for the Wikipedia page for Puella Magi Madoka Magica)
Tsunami: one of the names of anguish.
Also "entropy," also "earthquake," also
"heat death." Magic is the existing;
light and air become realized. A revelation
for an audience, made into hands,
from attempted disaster. A shaft of light.
The first heart remembers explicit beginnings.
Profound darkness lauds the older perfections,
the lack that starts time. This is how to kill
that suffering, the forever night of no stories.
First, find ten names for the daring narrative,
writing out "hope," "kindness," "something like this."
Then meet the inescapable magic. The immortal
problem of the Individual: how can she connect?
How can she draw a beautiful essence, without
complications, without twisting it into corpse dissonance?
Alleviate and heal and apologize, but continue.
She reveals that she is the rebellion,
that she is the new intention. November becomes December,
and girls become the new peril of the world.
Become a series of free lives. Beautiful, as fluid,
she will layer the stars into the years.
Deconstruct Genesis and find subversion of the cruel.
A wish. Any wish. Creation is as inescapable as want.
Death can force herself into law, can enforce the sacrifice
of all girls in the city. The older darkness wants
the final word, which is "nothing was."
But the first wish determines the path of them all.
And that first wish is a vow.
The first impossible memory.
Her words: "My beloveds will live."
POST TRANSITION GLOW UP TIMELINE
Little boys on the cusp
of manhood are many things,
like cruel, and salted,
and of star anise.
This boy, fingers dusted
with char and sod, is still wet.
"When I grow up I want to be
an astronaut." Nothing about
airless fire or red sand makes
his heart tremble,
nothing in heaven of anything
more than a quiet luster. Just
an awareness of weight,
its impossible absence
become a kind of lust.
Love is always learned young,
at the dinner table.
It is something he knows the shape of,
something he remembers
by the way he runs
his tongue over where it should be,
which is to say, something he
thinks he should know.
Little boys on the cusp of
manhood are told they can be
anything they can imagine. They
are not told they can be things
they cannot imagine. Like damp
forever, and soft in the throat,
and an apple buried unbitten.
You can become something you've
never seen before,
something that doesn't ache.
When I grow up I want to be a Trojan Horse
virus. I want to look like a gift
and taste like honeydew. I want to be a small
thing, that arrives and grows to fill space.
I want even the greater gentlenesses,
the ones not allowed me. And I want to be
the color of grapefruit and always at home,
I want to be every kind of boy that a boy
is not. I want to be alive, which means
loved.
Nora Hikari is a poet, artist, and Asian-American trans woman based in Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in West Trestle Review, ANMLY, Ogma Magazine, and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, DEAD NAMES, is forthcoming at Another New Calligraphy, and her second chapbook, Girl 2.0, was shortlisted in the 2021 Animal Heart Press Chapbook Competition. She can be found at @norabot2.0 on Instagram and at her website norahikari.com.