Jon Stone: Bedhair (interpretative translations of Yosano Akiko)

Jon Stone

Jon Stone was born in Derby in 1983 and currently works as a freelance editor in London, where he also co-produces the arts journal Fuselit. His writing has most recently appeared in the anthologies City State: New London Poetry and Stop Sharpening Your Knives 3, as well as Pen Pusher magazine. He was attracted to the idea of creating new versions of Yosano Akiko’s tanka after realising how easy it was for radical and feminist writers to be overtaken by the eras they helped create and appear quaint or even conservative by contemporary standards; he wanted to find some way of representing how fiercely modern and frank these poems would have been in the context of the cultural climate in which they originally appeared. He is currently putting together a pair of micro-anthologies of poetry based on computer games and Japanese folk monsters, as well as a book that collects three sold-out issues of Fuselit.

Bedhair

(interpretative translations of Yosano Akiko)

My black bolt of hair
is a mess again — a ‘Which Line
Leads Home?’ puzzle
where each strand begins, ends
with a different thought of you.

The weekend’s a through-train
bulleting past where we stand.
“Not a damn thing lasts,”
I cry, forcing both his hands
to grapple with both my breasts.

Stumbled in, quite wrecked
from an all-nighter. My Guinness —
thick tangled hair
brushes the strings of my Rick.
Only note played since I bought it.

“You’ve got morning breath,”
I whisper, and slink from his room
one Saturday, pausing
at his strewn, softly crippled jeans.
With a shrug, I hoik them on.

Serious, bird’s nest
which-wind-did-I-fuck bedhair.
Just give me a comb
and the morning rain, filtered
through a blackbird’s pinions.

He wakes me by crooning
‘Hallelujah’. “Your hair looks
like a baffled king.”
He chucks me his greasy flick-comb.
I go red and miss the catch.

I was built to wound
men’s dark hearts from a distance.
A just punishment:
my blacker than bike-grease hair,
my whiter than salt-flake skin.