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September 29, 2026

night walk, with 16 mice and the moon

Mia Nakaji Monnier

night has arrived / look, the sky is dark, dark

we line up and follow the path of horsetails / tap, tap

the fiddleheads unfurl their tender faces

mountain’s breath, fairy bells / the forest is flowering

 

the moon looks smaller than usual, unfocused and deflated

(still big enough to make into a Castella cake we could eat for days)

we call out, are you okay? and the moon says yes, but her rasping voice

shows she has a cold / we’ve arrived at the meadow / light floods

 

yarn has tangled around our legs / we gather it / wind it

if we keep going surely we’ll find the whole ball

it grows round / soon we can no longer carry it / have to roll it

we reach the end of the strand / the wind / smells faintly of flowers

 

maybe / this is a seed / shall we plant it all together?

we till the earth / make a blanket of dry grass / and clouds

press our foreheads to the fevered moon

 

 

 

Sources, in order of appearance:

  • おつきさま こんばんは (Good Evening, Dear Moon) by Akiko Hayashi
  • 14ひきのぴくにっく (The 14 Forest Mice and the Spring Meadow Picnic) by Kazuo Iwamura
  • かぜひきまんげつ (The Moon Caught a Cold) by Shoichi Nejime and Ayako Rokkaku
  • ぐりとぐら (Guri and Gura) by Rieko Nakagawa and Yuriko Omura
  • ぐりとぐらのえんそく(Guri and Gura’s Picnic Adventure) by Rieko Nakagawa and Yuriko Yamawaki
  • 14ひきのかぼちゃ (The 14 Forest Mice and the Pumpkin) by Kazuo Iwamura
  • チリとチリリまちのはなし (Chirri & Chirra On the Town) by Kaya Doi

Mia Nakaji Monnier is a writer and artist in Los Angeles, who has also lived in East Peoria, Northern California, Texas, Japan, and more. Her poetry appears in The Seventh Wave, KHÔRA, Best New Poets 2024, and Silly Goose Press. She is currently working on a poetry collection about mothers and daughters. You can find her on Instagram @miagabb or trying to keep up her Japanese skills enough to read picture books to her three-year-old.

 

 

 

For my rule, I chose to write a poem using only words from Japanese children’s books I regularly read with my child. I translated playfully but overall stuck to the meaning and spirit of the source texts. Though I have tried literary translation before, I think this is the closest I’ve come to translating like a translator — that is, taking responsibility for the English version of the material enough not just to translate the original directly. Because I am Japanese American and not truly fluent in Japanese, the language always felt too precious for me to take liberties converting it into English. Something is always lost in the process. But translating a found poem felt freeing because I both had the constraints of the existing material and got to create the specifics of it through my own interpretation.