She opened her mouth as if her throat were a birdready to leave her. I thought she was going to singfor the dead, because she said she always saw them.I was cold. I snuggled against her like a tall cat.When she put the petals of a hydrangea on my eyelids,I heard rain pattering behind them,and I was a window from which she saw her friendsreturn: lights lit inside them, now alive, now burning,moths in a struggle to escape their own wingsedged with fire. She waved at them and spokethrough me, fogging my skin with words I couldn’t hear.I wasn’t cold anymore, her breath so warm, her cheekpressed against the fragile glass, which was my body.
Séance in Daylight
Yuki Tanaka
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“Séance in Daylight” from CHRONICLE OF DRIFTING: by Yuki Tanaka.
Published by Copper Canyon Press on April 15, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 by Yuki Tanaka.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Born and raised in Yamaguchi, Japan, Yuki Tanaka is the author of a debut poetry collection, Chronicle of Drifting, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in April 2025. His poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. He received an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in English from Washington University in St. Louis. He lives in Tokyo and teaches at Hosei University.
“Tanaka’s singular view, somewhat detached yet not lacking in compassion, soberly reckoning while allowing for flights of optimism, is, again, the product of the angle of vision of the flaneur, the stranger in town, the person who has seen it all but decides not to linger on individual premises too long. . . . This discreet version of the ‘I’ as a drifting, neutral observer in the war zone that is life—not Tanaka’s only attitude, but a prevalent one—offers a valuable refinement of the poetic speaker, less self-centered, at most a participant-observer. Of his many gifts in this sterling debut collection, Tanaka’s discreet and subtle management of tone sits uppermost. In offering it consistently, he invites us, too, whether casual reader or professional poet, to commit to our own drifting, which just might, if carefully husbanded, lead to our own chronicle.”
—Johnny Payne, Merion West
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