“Head Tree,” “Life On Mars,” and “Fitting” are three psychedelically surreal prose poems by Satoshi Iwai from our Fall 2018 issue.

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“Head  Tree” 

AFTER A LONG AND INSULAR COMA, sitting up in the half-melted bed, I find an apple tree has grown on my head. Each wall of the room is covered with the fun house mirrors which reflect the tapestry of deformed leaves. Thirteen years have passed while I had been sleeping.

The tree has a dozen branches which bear a hundred fruits. The shadow of the trunk tells me an eternal noon. Hiding behind the leaves, a wise snake tells me the sweet pain of molting. When a cool breeze comes I find that I have already gotten my ex-wife out of my head.

I wonder how many apples have grown to birds on my head until I die. Fishes die in the sea, but birds don’t die in the sky. Still, all I can do is forget every summer that has gone. When the warm rain stops falling, the first cloned passenger pigeon will fly away from my tree.

“Life  on  Mars”

YOU DON’T NEED TO WONDER why that old man can paint pictures so quickly, or why he and every old man appeared in his pictures look so alike. He doesn’t care about how his pictures look like, because he has lost his sight entirely since he was a little child.

The passersby don’t care about his blindness. They admire him just because he paints his self portraits without any photograph. At the abandoned bus stop, sitting on the half-broken bench, he depicts hundreds of his own faces under the sun, even under the new moon.

He is homeless, and he believes that he is homeless on Mars. Martians have three eyes, so he is confused every time when he can’t touch the third eye on his forehead. He is always in the dusk. Dusk is called mirrors on Mars. He always feels blue. Blue is called infinity on Mars.

“Fitting”

DON’T STAY TOO LONG IN THIS FITTING ROOM. The mirror in front of you reflects you wearing a white sweater and the mirror behind you that reflects you wearing a white sweater and the mirror in front of you that reflects the mirror behind you that reflects you wearing a white sweater and the mirror in front of you that reflects the mirror behind you that reflects you wearing a black sweater. If you answer your cell phone, someone tells you in a very, very hoarse voice. You are what you wear. Then, there is no one in this fitting room. The mirror in front of your absence reflects your absence and the mirror behind your absence that reflects your absence and the mirror in front of your absence that reflects your absence behind your absence that reflects your absence and the mirror in front of your absence that reflects a crumpled white sweater on the floor.

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SATOSHI IWAI was born and lives in Kanagawa, Japan. He writes poems in English and in Japanese. His English work has appeared in Heavy Feather Review, Small Po[r]tions, Hotel Amerika, Poetry Is Dead, and elsewhere.