Step 1. Be your father’s son.
Step 2. Your body wants to become your father. It is you who wants anything but this. Where there is hair and muscle and sweat, you keep peeling away with your fingernails to reveal cherry blossoms and clear river. To become your father, you must surrender to the seething drive of your body to become something unbearable.
Step 3. Stop being your father’s son.
Step 4. Pray every day. A prayer is a kind of promise that has no authority to hold you accountable. Pray for forgiveness. Pray for salvation. Pray to be someone other than you are. You don’t mean it. Pray harder.
Step 5. Destroy 80% of your liver.
Step 6. Your natural state will be to love with your hands. Your natural state will be to try to make your hands soft like clay. You want to give to the way your lover moves. You want to succumb to gentle things. This is not the way to be your father. He was carved from stone. His fists are boulders holding closed the garden tomb. His palms are the mouth of a dark cave. The closest thing you have is your clay. Find a kiln.
Step 7. To be your father you must never forgive your father. To be your father you must never forgive your mother. You must never forgive your father’s father or your father’s mother. To be your father is to be a species of thing to which forgiveness is irrelevant.
Step 8. As a daughter, you are ached and clotted. This makes you weak. This makes your weakness an honesty. For your father, a weakness is only ever a lie. It is a tactic to outlive his food. To be your father, you must learn to lie.
Step 9. As a daughter, your body is made of willow wood. I mean it folds into the arms of the wind. I mean it is supple and alive. To be your father you must be a corpse hickory. You must give up your life, in favor of strength.
Step 10. This is the most fatal step. To be your father, you must be your father.
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Nora Hikari (she/her) is a disabled Chinese and Japanese transgender poet and artist based in NYC. She was a 2022 Lambda Literary fellow, and her work has been published in Ploughshares, Palette Poetry, Foglifter, The Journal, The Washington Square Review, and others. Her hybrid fiction, KISS ME FAST, was featured in the Wigleaf Top 50 for 2023. She was a reader at the 2022 Dodge Poetry Festival. Nora Hikari can be found on twitter and instagram at @system_wires
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image: MM Kaufman
Rejection Letters 