Excerpt from shima by Shō Yamagushiku — Hamilton Review of Books

Excerpt from shima by Shō Yamagushiku. Copyright © 2024 Shō Yamagushiku.

Published by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

Shō Yamagushiku. *shima.* McClelland & Stewart. $22.50, 96 pp., ISBN: 9780771010927

I greet my uncle at the harvest festival.

He turns his back.

The village spreads itself for

the feverish water dream.

The forest blossoms with my failures.

I am ravenous

for a golden tradition. I am brimming

with fangs and mandates.

My eyes are cameras. My feet are

clubs. The village

is suspended above the water. I am

stroking its underbelly.

I am stealing glances at my

own grave.

I am forcing my body inside a

closed ritual. I am

prying at everything that resembles

a hinge or a door. I am

squeezing a child’s throat, demanding

to know why my language

has no name.

I am breaking over an elder’s

head. I am

waking in a living room

my hands roving

past the family altar.

I am glimpsing the emperor’s

smile in a villager’s tired face.

I am swallowing

whole offerings of fruit

meant for the gods.

I am picking ﬂesh from my teeth.

The village is tilting

on its axis. It is turning.

All its organs are

spilling across the bay.

I am taking the sharpest stick

and poking the root

ancestor. I am

insisting that if he awakens

I will have something

useful to say.

Shō Yamagushiku is an independent writer and researcher. He writes from the homelands of the Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples (Victoria, BC). shima is his first poetry collection.