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# One Poem by Brandon Shimoda
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/one-poem-by-brandon-shimoda/
- Published: 2018-01-03T12:00:15.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:25:41.000Z
- Description: Our poetry editor, Wendy Xu, has selected one poem by Brandon Shimoda for her monthly series that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers.
- Author: Wendy Xu
- Tags: Poetry, Hyperallergic Poetry, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-18 14:37 (2018)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/01/shambhavi-singh-maati-7-detail.jpg)

Shambhavi Singh, “Maati 7 “(detail) (2017), acrylic on canvas on board, 13.5” x 89.5” (in four parts) (image courtesy the artist and Talwar Gallery, New York | New Delhi)

## THE DESERT

To think of a large country  
spoiled  
by its intractable people

men mostly dense as cookies

A country  
divided by black rivers

white birds on ice

wings recalling

people on the other side floating, careless  
somehow eternal

The lake was on fire

Burning pyres hydrocephalous

We walked into the wind the wind was bright lime  
steppe fires were suspended  
from gallows

Frogs with blinking throats  
on top of each other, moving

their arms to show each other, these are my wigs

And rabbits a white grasshopper  
hopping backwards

water buffaloes where rapias formed.

a brown braid  
hanging from a fence flower of lice

someone offered to a cave

devotions, or  
two spirits, in the cell

pushing through  
strep red hot, at first

then effigies  
of someone sleeping, dreaming,

Mourning  
is a practical matter

an alibi

When the enormous white fish  
ate the cockroach, the dog  
next door  
started barking.

The bodies rose  
from the mud swung their hair around  
swung their redolent faces

I said no took the fish  
that was offered

\* \* \*

Brandon Shimoda’s recent books are [*Evening Oracle*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0988713756/?tag=hyperallergic-20&ref=hyperallergic.com) (Letter Machine Editions) and its sequel, [*The Desert*](https://the-song-cave.com/products/the-desert-by-brandon-shimoda?ref=hyperallergic.com), forthcoming in 2018 from The Song Cave. His work has appeared in *Hyperallergic* once before — in [an essay on the photographic legacy of Japanese American incarceration](https://hyperallergic.com/367939/i-am-an-american-the-photographic-legacy-of-japanese-american-incarceration/). He lives in the desert.