NORA HIKARI —

AN ORAL HISTORY OF HOPE

after Never Angeline Nørth

Two monster girls give each other

back rubs in the back of a Toyota Camry.

Two monster girls have never seen

each other or anyone like themselves

and email back and forth pitch-shifted

self portraits of hacksaws.

Two monster girls upload a PDF to

MonstersPlace.com about how to

biohack survival using common toiletries and

uncircumcised hypodermic needles.


Monster girls know rituals; old magic; 

blood sigils and mystic text study

and autostigmata; there's a way to get there

if you have a knife and conviction.

Cost of admission: a precious burden.

Most girls offer an organ. A flap of skin.

Tendons plucked from gently unbound wrists.

Every monster girl spends her life accumulating 

rituals and spells to bring about the end of time. 

This is what all her wishes are, at their core.


"One day we'll be together,"

every single atrocity says to every other.

"One day I'll be real and you can touch

me in realspace." It's a convergent prayer,

independently developed across time and

space, in the thick throatfolds of every

monmusume. We just want to be born. We're

just tired of waiting to be real.


The prophecy reads: one day,

the sun will explode, or a nuclear apocalypse

will bless the treeline, or mother Poseidon

will consider us too bashful and take us home.

In that world, there isn't left handed or right

handed, there aren't values to solve for like "X"

or "Y," there aren't even people left.


Only monsters, turned loud and uncountable,

unhung from starskies and pulled from the sea.

Every imaginary girl, turned bloodshed real,

every girl who ever wanted to scream "I want

to burn it all down,"

BETWEEN WATER AND LIGHT

(A found poem for the Wikipedia page for Puella Magi Madoka Magica)

Tsunami: one of the names of anguish.

Also "entropy," also "earthquake," also

"heat death." Magic is the existing;

light and air become realized. A revelation 

for an audience, made into hands, 

from attempted disaster. A shaft of light.


The first heart remembers explicit beginnings. 

Profound darkness lauds the older perfections,

the lack that starts time. This is how to kill

that suffering, the forever night of no stories.

First, find ten names for the daring narrative,

writing out "hope," "kindness," "something like this."

Then meet the inescapable magic. The immortal

problem of the Individual: how can she connect?

How can she draw a beautiful essence, without

complications, without twisting it into corpse dissonance?


Alleviate and heal and apologize, but continue. 

She reveals that she is the rebellion,

that she is the new intention. November becomes December,

and girls become the new peril of the world.

Become a series of free lives. Beautiful, as fluid,

she will layer the stars into the years.

Deconstruct Genesis and find subversion of the cruel.


A wish. Any wish. Creation is as inescapable as want.

Death can force herself into law, can enforce the sacrifice

of all girls in the city. The older darkness wants 

the final word, which is "nothing was." 

But the first wish determines the path of them all. 

And that first wish is a vow.

The first impossible memory. 

Her words: "My beloveds will live."

POST TRANSITION GLOW UP TIMELINE

Little boys on the cusp

of manhood are many things,

like cruel, and salted,

and of star anise.

This boy, fingers dusted

with char and sod, is still wet.

"When I grow up I want to be

an astronaut." Nothing about

airless fire or red sand makes

his heart tremble,

nothing in heaven of anything

more than a quiet luster. Just

an awareness of weight,

its impossible absence

become a kind of lust.

Love is always learned young,

at the dinner table.

It is something he knows the shape of, 

something he remembers 

by the way he runs

his tongue over where it should be,

which is to say, something he

thinks he should know.

Little boys on the cusp of

manhood are told they can be

anything they can imagine. They

are not told they can be things

they cannot imagine. Like damp

forever, and soft in the throat,

and an apple buried unbitten.

You can become something you've

never seen before, 

something that doesn't ache.

When I grow up I want to be a Trojan Horse 

virus. I want to look like a gift

and taste like honeydew. I want to be a small

thing, that arrives and grows to fill space.

I want even the greater gentlenesses, 

the ones not allowed me. And I want to be

the color of grapefruit and always at home,

I want to be every kind of boy that a boy

is not. I want to be alive, which means

loved.

Nora Hikari is a poet, artist, and Asian-American trans woman based in Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in West Trestle Review, ANMLY, Ogma Magazine, and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, DEAD NAMES, is forthcoming at Another New Calligraphy, and her second chapbook, Girl 2.0, was shortlisted in the 2021 Animal Heart Press Chapbook Competition. She can be found at @norabot2.0 on Instagram and at her website norahikari.com.