Like a snake smelling your wrist when you bend
to pick a toad lily

Only light moves fast enough for me.

I have never met anyone who looked like me.

I walk back into the city, which wraps round me like velvet trimmed with stars.

A zuihitsu

Oh, my windowsill garden: bloom!

Each wave, larger than the one before.

Flooded with bright orange and yellow the painting completes itself.

Pulled up in the net of memory

Of course, there are common words

Someone circulated quietly around the room.

zuihitsu for group c

there is no self just rapture

The roar of life through a thimble.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter what’s in my hands, but how my hands hold

We were two sides of the same glass

If I stay shut, I’m just my pair of eyes.

I will be bird to your wire.

I’m learning, each day, what it may mean to live.

what if this is not about blood at all?

“domestic bliss” and “it brings a tomorrow feeling”

Twenty-one writers interpret the genre

Satsuki Shibuya’s “Zuihitsu: Peaceful” and “Zuihitsu: Fiery”

Poets share what draws them to the genre

Following the brush

Queer poet Ching-In Chen’s letter to their younger self procures its epistolary strength from the loosely connected ideas of the zuihitsu.