Music, nectar poetry

NORA HIKARI

Title: Reaching Poem: I used to be unafraid of holding: would catch minnows with my bare hands, waist-deep in Sand Lake. Child fingers unabashed like ruddy eaglets, snapping gleefully to feed my yellow bucket homeschool. Something changed by the time I met the parakeet. She thrummed on my finger, heart like a little wind-up toy, and for the first time I was afraid of killing. Why won't you touch me, she would ask me again, and instead of lying I would say her name like some kind of substitutionary atonement. Easier than saying I've scaled too many lovebound salmon, pinched too many antgirls into black-blue dreaming to trust my hands with peace. You don't know me. You don't know that I was built in the hands of a fisherman, wicked fingers baited with gospel, taught second-nature the required energetic processes for life. My Chinese grandmother greets us with Have you eaten? Leads us deeper into the house where my father, as a child, lost all his milk teeth at once. I am at the aquarium. She is gentle and asks me to stroke the anemone with her. Feel the way it stings. I am reaching into the water and I am touching. I am touching. I am touching.

Nora Hikari (she/her) is an emerging poet and Asian-American trans lesbian based in Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in Perhappened Magazine, Ogma Magazine, and Dust Magazine, among others, and her poem Deer-to-Fish Transition Timeline has been nominated for the Best of the Net award. She can be found at @norabotbot on Twitter or at her website norahikari.com

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