Sophia Terazawa

Sophia Terazawa is the author of three collections, Winter Phoenix (Deep Vellum, 2021), Anon (Deep Vellum, 2023), and the forthcoming Oracular Maladies, a finalist for the 2023 Noemi Press Book Award. She has also published two chapbooks, I AM NOT A WAR (Essay Press, 2016) and Correspondent Medley (Factory Hollow Press, 2019), winner of the 2018 Tomaž Šalamun Prize. She currently teaches poetry and hybrid forms at Virginia Tech as Visiting Assistant Professor. Tetra Nova (Deep Vellum, 2025) is her first novel.

---

Monarch de Jure

We cannot speak about it, wave a silk sash, pen oblique forecasts bent for trouble.

Who supplicates a thousand-year rule? Clipped to microphones: đi, đi          is muffled.

     ```

Chị tám stilettos          ‘i’ in praise, I might exhaust.

Fury has a thin pudding, warm and cold.

     ```

You, in lilac, what’s your name? Can you go to your mother’s house? Does her country

     welcome you back?

     ```

It’s said of our diva who favored, toward the end of her life, cherry tomatoes, brought a silk

     parasol to her own funeral.

I set fifteen joss sticks in front of her portrait.

Chị tám          so chided, enough. Even praise has a limit.

---

Figured beyond Measure

In this shot, silk worms on mulberry leaf indicate a hybrid zone.

Our theater remains

     standing fractures in the dark          who warbles without smudging her makeup.

A backup dancer pumps away          irrelevant why we cry.

                                                Downstage, a diva, her gown we’re shocked by

                                                patriotic to which part of exile?—

                                                     hoa cúc in the hybrid zone

                                                     evokes easy movement. Round

                                                radiant face, I stiffen each part of us leaving.

---

The Cellist

Tall as Kenzo at two

deciding if a bird

could be enough

à voix basse,

called to say

clouds take every shape

though one

with all this wind

and Kenzo,

who’s not my child yet

padding across our stage,

turned quiet.

Kenzo, come here.

---

Oracles, Untended

If you must know our language,

there’s a field some call a garden.

Go there if you can.

                                                            Back to subjects of want,

                                                            never have we seen so many flowers.

Here’s a plate and gardens beyond.

Paleo-

You walk to our city of torture, reign

from simple joy. A vesper drum

                                                            most serenely carries, if it should,

                                                            inflection.

May you not tire so soon.

Meso-

I forget to say

                                                            he, such desire drapes

                                                            Đại

                                                            on a horse.

Neo-

May our divas sing

untended

by night. You glance upon the cabinet.

Paleo-

Seals collected, ransacked, a treasure,

no subject is joy spread about its sentence. You walk

two concubines behind.

                                                            Latin

                                                            desolates.

Meso-

I forget.

Neo-

     ```     ```          ```     ``````

                                                            an act jeweled in parts. Take the plate.

                                                            Break it.

---