Poem of the Week

Sushi in a Landlocked State

Jen Frantz

I bought sushi from a Mexican guy

who always wore an ascot. His name

was Eduardo, and I was in love with

him. Everyone was in love with him,

especially the Polish housewives.

They ate his sushi with their hands

in the parking lot. I waited until I

got home, where I ate the sushi

with a pair of blue chopsticks,

always as the sun was going down

over the plains, and the college

students were walking someone’s

dog for free, and the mother below

me was boiling soda just because

her son was curious. Sometimes

I’d see a Polish housewife around

town, and she’d have a list in

her hand and a pencil with a big

eraser. Couldn’t we share Eduardo?

Live together in a big silo with a pot

of flowers and a big TV? Think of

the languages, all the ways we’d

describe a bellyache. But Eduardo

moved away with his ginger boyfriend—

I think to a place with a “scene.”

The Yale Review · “Sushi in a Landlocked State” by Jen Frantz

what surprised you about the composition of this poem?

This poem was part of an aborted manuscript called “Hat Doctor”—more or less a series of one hundred poems in which I imagined the speaker wearing a ridiculous hat. I think this is the only poem, out of those one hundred, that I’m proud of. I wrote this poem quickly, in a certain flight of inspiration that comes only after writing a hundred other crappy things, and I was thinking all the time of my years in Iowa, and of how people kept telling me not to eat the sushi there—and, in fact, not to eat any sushi in a landlocked state. Now I know better. Now I know about rivers and lakes. There are fish in them. There are fish everywhere. Good luck to them, and to all the hungry people.

Jen Frantz left Yale to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was poetry editor of The Iowa Review. You can find her reading in the bathtub or pixelated at jenfrantz.com.

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