Fall 2014, Volume 17

Poetry by Toshiaki Komura

Even After a Happy Ending, a Fairy Tale Continues

We were lost—
contrived corridors, cunning
passages, the giving
that famishes the craving
after full satiation: must
the fairy tale’s corpse
be sullied? Perhaps
the next pages say
death, death, that is a displaced name
for words, but words
are a displaced name
of a snowy whiteness
that refers to her mirror sometimes
as a scythe-holding mistress
is known to do. True
to the truth of image, the fairy
tails away, and happily
the tale continues in absence
of itself, in words, in nonsense
verse as versos to rectos: leaves
foraged through by wind or mind
leaving senses behind, as we’ve known to do.

 

 

 

BIO: Toshiaki Komura received his MFA from Cornell University and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and he currently works as an Assistant Professor of English at Fuji Women’s University. His work has appeared in literary journals including Verdad, as well as Evansville Review, Georgetown Review, Sycamore Review, Willow Review, among others.