Haibun Today

Announcement: Haibun Today, the Blog, Goes Quarterly

2010-01-01T07:00:00.008-05:00

Call for Submissions

Haibun Today—First Quarterly Issue, March 2010

Haibun Today, a literary blog devoted to the promotion of haibun since 2007, will become an online quarterly webzine in 2010 with issues in March, June, September and December. You can now find Haibun Today at www.haibuntoday.com as well as at its original haibuntoday.blogspot.com address. Full access to the Haibun Today archives will continue to be available via either site.

You are invited to submit haibun for consideration in the March 2010 issue of Haibun Today. You can consult our Submission Guidelines at Haibun Today. Forward any submissions by email to Jeffrey Woodward, Editor, at haibun.today@gmail.com.

Thank you for sharing this call widely.

Sincerely,

Jeffrey Woodward, Editor

Haibun Today

www.haibuntoday.com

Bob Lucky: A Walk Before Dawn

2009-12-30T07:00:00.001-05:00

flattened frog the silence of early morning

every five years

every cell in our bodies is replaced

you don’t need to know that

to know the love we made last night

is not the love we made a decade ago

is not the love we found that night

at the end of monsoon on a rooftop in Delhi

the macaques chattering in the trees

battered suitcase

the smoothness

of a worn handle

every journey recalled is retaken
reassembled memories of the shrine
to the stillborn and aborted
make room in my heart for this
frog flat and sundried as leather

caught between a tire and the pavement

in the disappearing act of life

I take it by a leg and make it hop

like a shadow puppet across the sky

then toss it into the weeds

sunrise

the darkness fades

into birdsong

by Bob Lucky

Hangzhou, China

Richard Straw: Retrospective Haibun, or Why I Love the Past

2009-12-27T07:00:00.000-05:00

I’m a writer with strong nostalgic longings. One of my favorite essayists is Charles Lamb, someone else who labored for decades as a harmless office worker and who also longed for and wrote mostly about the past. Gerald Monsman talks about this aspect of Charles Lamb in Confessions of a Prosaic Dreamer: Charles Lamb's Art of Autobiography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1984). For example, see pp. 40-42:

Because quotidian or physical reality presents itself as a privation, Lamb's work is "mainly retrospective," as Walter Pater noted...For Elia, the South-Sea House in its desolation becomes a symbol of all vanished glory―all forms of absence or distance in space, time, and consciousness that undermine the original grounding of reality...In the "Oxford" essay, Elia shifts his scene analogously, moving from the outer world of the present to an interior world of the past in quest of a reality that will underwrite existence...The present is always "flat, jejune" (lacking nourishing quality), and the past seems to beckon men to an escape from the insipid starved present.

Monsman then quotes from Lamb's "Oxford in the Vacation," the second in the Essays of Elia:

Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that, being nothing, art every thing! When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity—then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou called'st it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being every thing! the past is every thing, being nothing!

I titled my first collection of haibun The Longest Time because the past is the time that I've lived in and think about the most. The present is so fleeting it's almost nonexistent, and the future of course is unknown. This situation is bound to intensify as I age.

by Richard Straw

Cary, North Carolina

Sharon Auberle & Ralph Murre: Porte des Morts

2009-12-24T07:00:00.000-05:00

crow and seagull

on whirling winds

a white orchid at the window

fading

Dull olive of cedar outweighs other colors, rationed so carefully in northern winter. The ground is snow-covered; the sky gray; the bay, jagged slates, soon to be frozen. Slender crimson of osier, hue of salmon-flesh where the wind has stolen bark from birch. Rarely, salmon on the rocky foreshore to feed a gull or crow.

Winter reminds us that all things come and go. There is freedom in what remains—the bones, the wind, bare branches. An old man dies on an island.

out in the passage

a ferryman’s fog-signal

the great lake steaming

by Sharon Auberle & Ralph Murre

Sister Bay, Wisconsin

And Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin

Chen-ou Liu: The Floating World

2009-12-23T07:00:00.000-05:00

Struck by its sharpness and fragility, I study a blade of grass. This opens my eyes to spring blossoms and winter snow, to nature's wide horizon, to the world I live in.

on the bent tip

of a blade of grass

a dewdrop

by Chen-ou Liu

Ajax, Ontario, Canada

Announcement: Publication of Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose #2 - Winter 2009

2009-12-20T19:51:00.003-05:00

MET Press is pleased to announce the publication of the second issue of the biannual journal, Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose, edited by Jeffrey Woodward. MH&TP 2 has been published in print, in PDF ebook, and in an online digital edition. This Winter 2009 issue is 180 pages in a trade paperback. ISSN 1947-606X.

Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose has established itself as the first and only periodical devoted exclusively to these two mixed prose-and-verse genres. Haibun and tanka prose belong to the ancient and venerable tradition of Japanese poetry and belles-lettres. Their practice has waned in modern Japan but, with the continuing popularity of their respective parent-forms, haiku and tanka, in the West, haibun and tanka prose are experiencing unprecedented growth and diverse experimentation from New York to London, from Berlin to Brisbane, and in small towns and open countryside around the globe. Haibun and tanka prose are busily revising the general literary map and, in doing so, quietly reforming haiku and tanka also. Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose, a biannual journal, faithfully represents the full range of styles and themes adopted by contemporary practitioners and intends to play a vanguard role in charting the rapid evolution of these genres.

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Check out Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose at http://www.themetpress.com/modernhaibunandtankaprose/masthead.html
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For more information, contact the editor, Jeffrey Woodward, at MHTP.EDITOR@GMAIL.COM

Dana-Maria Onica: Untitled

2009-12-18T07:00:00.001-05:00

Here was a lake surrounded by trees—oaks, as far as I remember.

Where is the tall grass? Where is the wind?

There is nothing left, only this sun killing all the seeds, to the last one, and us, its witnesses.

dying face—

the many open mouths

of the dry land

by Dana-Maria Onica

Petrosani, Romania

Richard Straw: Background Story, or Would You Like Prose with That Haiku?

2009-12-15T07:00:00.000-05:00

old red Schwinn
abandoned in weeds―
outburst of rain

The "old red Schwinn" poem was written on May 23, 1988. I was probably smoking a Marlboro Light at the time and resting my haiku notebook on my knee as I sat on the front porch steps of my first owned home in North Carolina. I was keeping an eye on my first child, who was 2 years old then. She was in front of me in her stroller and waiting to be pushed around the block again, a ritual we performed each night when I got home from work. I must have seen some neighborhood boy race his bike on the downhill straightaway that was the street in front of our house. Back then, seeing any bicyclist triggered daydreams about my old bike.

As a teenager in central Ohio, I'd sold Christmas card "subscriptions" door to door one summer to save enough money to help my parents buy the Schwinn for me (we went "halfsies"). Later, after I earned more money doing some gardening for a widow who lived near us, I hung matching wire baskets over its rear tire, a combination speedometer and odometer on its handlebars, and a rearview mirror near its left grip. I rode my Schwinn out to a quarry past the county fairgrounds to the north and to the basketball courts and baseball diamonds at all of the city parks, many of which were named after U.S. Presidents who had died in office―Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy. And of course, I often rode downtown to the Goodwill Store near the Episcopal Church so I could browse in its 10 cent bookracks, or I'd head for the cigar store in the shadow of the courthouse so I could leaf through the newest comic books (and peek at the girlie mag displays). Later, I'd bike to the Carnegie Public Library next to my parents' Baptist church where I "discovered" Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass one fateful summer afternoon.

The bike and I were inseparable until I loaned it to a friend to ride one summer morning. He said he needed to borrow it so he could go swimming with some other friends at a reservoir about 10 miles or so south of town. However, he abandoned the bike in a ditch after he ran over a nail and got a flat tire. And he neglected to tell me what happened until much later, too late for my dad and me to go out to find it.

The photograph was taken by my mom at the start of my one-and-only overnight bike hike in the mid-1960s. Our Boy Scout troop met on Monday evenings in the basement of a Methodist church downtown. One year, the scoutmaster decided we were old enough for a bike hike. So, we pedaled out of town about 10 miles to a small roadside park next to an abandoned electric power plant near a river, just 2 miles north from the village where my family lived in the early 1950s.

I seem to remember that my dad had to drive out with a replacement chain or tire for my bike at the halfway point of the hike. He may even have driven me to the roadside park with my repaired bike in the trunk of his Impala because the rest of the troop had gone ahead without me.

The power plant had a spooky, brick smokestack taller than anything else for miles around. Years later, when I read from William Blake's "Jerusalem," the line that goes "among these dark Satanic mills" made me remember that old building and its gloomy outbuildings encircled by barbwire and "Keep Out" signs. Looking up from a marshmallow browned by that long-dead campfire in the mid-1960s, I prayed that the oak woods wouldn't catch fire.

by Richard Straw

Cary, North Carolina

Dru Philippou: Sanctum

2009-12-12T07:00:00.000-05:00

lions of Apollo
guard his Delian temple
among bursts
of wild poppies
clambering for the heavens

I run the color red over Father’s free-floating columns drawn on paper, shading the emptiness between them green, compromising purity of shape. With a pencil, I taper the columns with shallow flutes, setting them onto stylobates. I sketch the abacuses and place them on capitals. Standing back, I gaze at the towering pillars, imagine them pulling loads. I reach for another pencil, thicken the walls around me and slowly tilt back my head.

by Dru Philippou

Taos, New Mexico

originally published in Modern English Tanka, Spring 2009

William Sorlien: Untitled

2009-12-09T07:00:00.002-05:00

Upstream a short distance from town is (or was, I should say) a working grain terminal and elevator, not exactly a harbor, perhaps most notable for its proximity to the railroad. The building remains, now an historic site.

Amidst the dirty concrete pilings beneath, we would fish for carp with bits of canned corn while rusty barges gradually subsided under loads of boxcar grain, smoke from pilfered cigarettes mingling with the odor of turgid water as we planned nefarious boyhood schemes.

The train tracks remain, although the riverfront has been subject to a decades long urban renewal, now surrounded by four-story apartments and condos. A far cry from the "old Levee" and degraded mansions-cum-ghetto rooming houses we feral house monkeys would terrorize.

If I close my eyes I can remember the sounds: six inch thick hemp rope slithering around massive steel pylons, a splash in murky ooze, the death throes of massacred carp, mouths agape and eyes blank, the clank and crash of breaking bottles disturbing the hiss of tons of pouring grain, jovial cursing of deeply tanned deckhands and the POP of rock salt fired from a .410 gauge shotgun by a drunken, angry train conductor—the crush of feet in flight, torn high-top sneakers scrambling across class 5 stone, our ragged panting, our laughter.

grain, steel and coal

russian hemp grown wild

along the tracks

by William Sorlien

St. Paul, Minnesota

Benita Kape: Linen Clouds

2009-12-06T07:00:00.002-05:00

Behind me the house which has a life of its own. Perhaps young children lie abed. One may be reading, the very young sleeping, the father listening to the radio. Perhaps the father has directed the older of the children to attend to after dinner chores.

But I, the woman of the house with but a month until the next expected baby arrives in spring, am seated here on the veranda. I have left the busy day's activities behind me. I have lowered my tiny frame and my big rounded ball of a belly into a deep chair. I look into a row of trees in a park across the road and claim it to be a forest in my mind's eye.

But beyond my little forest a forest of children loom large; children who play in the kindergarten on the edge of the small park. I muse in the present, drift back to the future; the times when grandchildren took up the tea-towels after a family meal; argued over who would wash and who would dry and who among them might be put on roster for another evening. Now great-grandchildren have reached an age to take their turn in the ritual of washing and drying dishes as I go take a seat in a quite corner.

They joke that I have no mechanical apparatus to do away with such a boring chore. Funny how quickly they learned to flick tea-towels. Funny how it does not remain boring for long.

linen clouds

a child

and a kitten

entertain their

sleeping audience

by Benita Kape

Gisborne, New Zealand

Chen-ou Liu: Candle

2009-12-03T07:00:00.001-05:00

Every year, together, my parents light a candle on my birthday cake, giving thanks to their God for the blessings I’ve received. Then I close my eyes, make a wish, and blow out the candle with my own breath.

birthday cakes

one on top

of another

pushing me down

six feet under

by Chen-ou Liu

Ajax, Ontario, Canada

Stanley Pelter: service

2009-12-01T00:13:00.003-05:00

funeral service

is a contortion

of her harsh life

at last

a loud voice hushed.

Nearly made 102. Nearly 2 weeks dead. She, we believe, lies nearby. To one side. The event inside this last-of-the-day is taking place in one section of a tiny chapel. 7 of the small congregation are Jewish. Some are frum. From Ireland, a grandson, his memorial a soft roll burr of mid-America. Timed to coincide, over there 3 more grandchildren make offerings. No one looks directly at her lily-topped coffin. A grand yet petite finale. Ageing son’s soliloquy, his own poem, balance emotion with sensible detachment. Some of the Jews murmur to a hymn, unclear how to retain their outsider status. Inside a silencing sonata, a curtain surrounds a final secret as it begins to disappear through a narrowing space.

inside the inside

of an acacia leaf

veins bulge

she passes into a realm

of invisibility

We make our way to a village pub. Meet in circular talk. Discuss photos in albums. Look inside picture frames. See into her twenties. Admire elegant poses of thirties. Talk beyond wartime songs: white cliffs of Dover. lily marlene. underneath the arches. we’ll meet again.

in a back room

of b/w photographs

such swirls of limbs

vagrant images

dispel inside memory

by Stanley Pelter

Claypole, Lincolnshire, England

Jeffrey Winke: In Mid-Night Wanders

2009-11-27T07:00:00.002-05:00

The rough idling of an 18-wheeler with its pshhhhit, pshhhhit airbrakes stir him in the early dawn. It’s best to move on anyway. Out of mercy or carelessness, the backdoor to this industrial cement-block building is open most nights and the protected, 15-degrees-warmer-than-outside-temp six-foot entranceway, leading to the locked steel interior door, is appreciated. It’s much better than the shelter with the dorm-style cots and the need to protect valuables from the coughing, expectorating human refuse with at least one druggie manic who “borrows” a pair of dry socks here and a warm hat there in mid-night wanders. And the shelter staff with their malevolent, pseudo-benevolent jesus-loves-you-stares. He wants to scream, “The f jesus loves me – if he does, why am I stuck here sleeping on my WILL DO ANYTHING FOR FOOD OR MONEY sign and begging for a bigger breakfast than an anorexic eats.”

bird carcass . . .

dirt, dry leaves

and gum wad

by Jeffrey Winke

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Bamboo Shoot: Close Encounters

2009-11-24T07:00:00.002-05:00

I’m not given to superstition or unsupported flights of imagination, but not so long ago, I had a strange experience, the details of which greatly amused my friends. Even now, the story still gains me much-needed status in chance conversation.

At a rather grand poetry festival, a well-known poet had recounted to us how, one day, he had opened the morning paper to see his own name spread across the front page in stark black capitals: ANTHONY THWAITE. Much intrigued, he had prepared his breakfast and returned to find the headline now saying ANTHRAX THREAT. Imagine my surprise then, when, only days later, the same trick was played on me.

I was sitting quietly in an almost empty reception area of the eye-clinic at my local hospital. To my left was a large reception desk, between which and the swing doors to my right, a young nurse was scurrying to and fro carrying files and forms; sometimes equipment. And on the desk was a large notice which said I’M GOING MAD. Well, after she had passed me for the umpteenth time, I couldn’t resist. ‘I’m not surprised’, I said.

She paused, ‘Pardon?’

‘I said, I’m not surprised’. . . and I smiled to reassure her of my normality.

She frowned as if perplexed; and when she next appeared, she stopped, ‘What were you on about?’

I smiled again, ‘Sorry, I just said that I’m not surprised, really . . . about your going mad’, and I pointed to the notice, which now read INCOMING MAIL . . .

Is it any wonder that our long gone ancestors sometimes suspected an infinitely bored God of poking a divine finger into our human affairs? Wasn’t that, after all, why I had raised my eyes, then, in a mix of mock horror and amused embarrassment, to the thin blue shield separating us from that imponderable blackness?

that damned cat again –
it knows me through doubled glass
at 50 yards

*

Close Encounters references Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Man meets extraterrestrial visitors). The misreading of words has nothing to do with poor eyesight; this part of my tale is about the nature of perception—in this case visual perception. The retina of the eye is an extension of the brain; and it only receives various wavelengths of light. These are computerised at various brain levels, making reference to the memory banks of past experience, in order to provide the ‘mind’ with a consistent view of the world (there is no real objective view of things—only a useful illusion of reality). But visual ‘mistakes’ can be made, and probably everyone has experienced such mistakes. First, something seen at distance may change into something else on closer inspection. But also sometimes, ‘pressed for time’ perhaps, the eye takes in insufficient information to make accurate perception possible; and the eye-brain makes its best guess. This is what has happened in my story (the fact that I was in an eye hospital is just one of those coincidental quirks of life). Note, that possibly something similar happened to Soseki in his Grass Pillow (BS 10.3; Sep 2000, pp44/45) when he thinks that he has seen a woman—his eye-brain deceived his mind. In the final paragraph, my looking upwards in embarrassment is an example of what psychologists would call ‘displacement activity’ (many other animals use it)—a superficially pointless action to relieve stress or avoid aggression etc. However, I am willing to bet that in Man’s case the act of looking upwards also has its roots in the history of religious culture—we look up to curse or thank our God. The ‘thin blue shield’ is, of course, Earth’s atmosphere—and parallels the double-glazing separating me from the cat who may be regarding me as some vengeful god.

by Bamboo Shoot
Salisbury, Wiltshire, England

Chen-ou Liu: Half-Past Tomorrow

2009-11-21T07:00:00.000-05:00

Everything has passed me by; I yearn for unseized moments. I think more of what has passed than of what will be. High expectations of youth have given way to acceptance. My life has always been and will always be uneventful: a series of events.

tomorrow creeps in
day by day . . .
the joints
of my memory
age and ache

I'm not happy; yet I'm not looking for happiness.

by Chen-ou Liu
Ajax, Ontario, Canada

Glenn G. Coats: Directions

2009-11-18T07:00:00.002-05:00

On Saturday morning, the rear entrance to the corner building is locked, so I enter through the front of the coffee shop. It is early and no one is sitting around the small tables that look out on Third Street. Someone from behind the counter calls out , “Good morning,” but I don’t stop. Their coffee is strong and leaves a bitter taste that lingers for hours. The building was once a bank, and I walk quickly past the first vault with its heavy door left open—a manmade cave. I push open the door that reads Emergency Exit Only and pass the elevator that I will not ride and climb two flights of metal stairs that are dirty and spotted with coffee stains. I click on the hall light several times to get it to work and check to see if the restrooms are locked.

midnight—
on the second floor
homeless stir

Wood is peeling from the door to room 2C, and the doorknob feels loose as I turn it. There are no windows in the office that now serves as a classroom for adults learning how to read. Two gray tables line up like roads coming to a T, and donated pictures hang on the walls. I settle into a heavy wooden chair and read over the story I will be teaching, asking myself about names and places that might confuse a new reader. I wonder about her experiences, has she ever gone camping, does she know what the surf sounds like? The door is open and I listen for feet tapping up the metal stairs. I know it will be my first student wanting to understand a few more words so The Holy Bible will begin to make sense to her.

morning classes—
through air ducts
the smell of burnt toast

by Glenn G. Coats
Prospect, Virginia

Adelaide B. Shaw: Montgomery Place

2009-11-15T07:00:00.000-05:00

We visit an historic house, one of many in the Hudson Valley.

Along the drive leading up to the mansion is an avenue of black locust. The signature tree on this estate. More locust on the river side. Some over 200 years old. Deep, knife-like ridges, forming as the tree ages, extend lengthwise down the trunk.

squinting in the sun—
character lines deeper
with each tree

We stroll past the trees, across the arboretum spread out on the far end of an expansive lawn. Red and white oak, beech, tulip, sweet gum, sycamore, maple. Each planted to give pleasure to the viewer for its size, shape and position on the lawn.

We continue around the mansion, stepping onto the veranda.

a reclining chair
with a river view—
a life before mine

A side path leads to a series of garden rooms, one spilling into another, like the waterfall in a shadowed corner tumbling into a pool. The breeze plays little tricks—first teasing with late blooming roses, then honeysuckle, then sage. We meander on the paths, noting the curving lines, the seemingly unplanned plan. A spontaneous eruption of vistas—lawns, gardens, river.

the cries of geese
crossing the hunting grounds
of ancient tribes

by Adelaide B. Shaw
Millbrook, New York

Richard Straw: Haibun: It's a Family Thing

2009-11-12T07:00:00.000-05:00

A haibun is a family gathering, perhaps a reunion, of young and old and middle aged. Some dads huff prose and some cousins whisper poetry and some sons and daughters do a bit of both or talk gibberish like an uncle through his beer and mustache. All are interacting, replaying old lines, trying new routines, listening to each other, or sleeping in front of the TV, the butt of a face-painting prank. The prose members and the haiku members can say the same lines elsewhere in another setting, such as in a formal gathering of poems or in a critic's selective review. Words voiced separately may even gain some acclaim and applause. Although what's said in nonfamily settings will sound similar to what was said before, it will have a different meaning, a loss usually of context. Outside the haibun family and its relationships, the family members will have different personalities, none perhaps as dynamic as what they share with those who also have similar lips and eyes, tones and intentions.

end of summer
another family
in my old home

So, in a haibun, the prose and the haiku can and will stand alone, just as they can and will stand together, depending on how a reader, the stranger, chooses to experience them. Haibunists can't expect that everything they write will be read in sequence and in its entirety. Novella-length haibun need to be broken up into edible parts, or they may not be read at all. Even some careful readers, such as Samuel Johnson, skim across the page and through a book, much like skaters on a river. The effect of the words that are read, either silently in one's head or aloud in an armchair or on a stage, will also vary depending on a reader's short-term memory and ability to comprehend what the writer may think has been clearly enunciated in black and white. It's all relative so to speak.

by Richard Straw
Cary, North Carolina

Editorial: The Survival of Haibun Today

2009-11-09T07:00:00.001-05:00

One year ago this morning I celebrated the first anniversary of Haibun Today in an editorial review of this blog’s stated mission and publishing record. I do not intend to repeat that performance on this, our second anniversary, but prefer, instead, to address the broader problem of the survival of haibun as a viable literary genre.

The haibun writer and connoisseur alike may be forgiven the complacent view—one reflective of human nature, perhaps—that the good that is present today will, of its own accord, be here tomorrow. Hasn’t haibun had a place in haiku literature in English for many decades? Aren’t haibun now a fixture in many haiku journals? A literary form, however, may be compared to a garden. Future harvests are not insured by this year’s gathering but only by the care and cultivation of each subsequent season’s plantings.

Haibun, of course, do date back to the early days of the adaptation of haiku to English. Robert Speiss, long-serving editor of Modern Haiku, published his Five Caribbean Haibun in 1972 and his works are by no means the earliest datable examples. Haibun may fairly be said to gain traction only in the 1990s, however, and to reach some level of sophistication and maturity toward the close of that decade and the beginning of the new millenium in such poets as David Cobb, Michael McClintock, Ken Jones, William Ramsey and others.

What then is lacking? In the editorial “Haibun Tomorrow? Maybe, Maybe Not” (Haibun Today, March 12, 2008), I opined that little in the way of informed critical study of haibun had been attempted and that even an adequate bibliography, a necessary tool for such investigation, did not exist. A bibliography is offered here at Haibun Today but it must be considered provisional and sketchy in every respect. Further, in my list of haibun’s shortcomings, I added:

Perhaps most telling and damning is the lack of a comprehensive historical anthology of haibun classics, one that includes both the earliest and latest significant achievements in the form . . . . For young would-be writers of haibun, this deficiency is critical and debilitating, for they face the challenge of learning a difficult art with only contemporary examples and their natural talents to guide them—historical and aesthetic continuity being a chimera.
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My enthusiasm for haibun as written and for haibun as it may yet be written has not wavered. It is this sense of promise, of great things yet to come, that explains the deprivation I feel in the absence of a retrospective collection of the finest haibun. However that may be, and however much I and others may believe that the haibun literature itself justifies such an authoritative and comprehensive anthology, many other tasks—less glamorous perhaps but no less essential to haibun’s survival—require the attention of sympathetic writers and editors.

The necessary work, broadly speaking, might be classed as critical and archival. Occupations for the critic, and haibun theorists and publicists alike are in short supply, include book reviews, historical and theoretical essays, and in-depth articles on or interviews with accomplished haibun practitioners. So little has and is being done, with respect to such activities, that every modest review or familiar essay must be regarded as a welcome contribution. Archival projects, on the other hand, include not only the compilation of an exhaustive bibliography but also the ultimate rescue, from the oblivion of the rare out-of-print journal or pamphlet, of many early exemplars of haibun as well as occasional essays or commentaries of historical and literary importance.

This labor is beyond the skill and resources of any one writer or journal but requires the participation of many hands in the haikai community. So, once again, I would like to call upon not only the self-interest of haibun poets in pursuing such goals but would like to appeal to the haikai community, as a whole, to meet what I see as an obligation, that of honoring and supporting a core aspect of its own artistic heritage, the haibun of Bashō and his far descendants.

by Jeffrey Woodward

Detroit, Michigan

Owen Bullock: Roche

2009-11-06T07:00:00.001-05:00

My first full-time job was in a pub kitchen. They did bar food and had a ‘posh’ restaurant upstairs for the evenings. I washed dishes, prepped ingredients, made sandwiches. I also became a shoulder to cry on for my bosses’ wife.

I was nineteen and wore a skimpy beard. The chef advised me to “shave it off and grow un again.” One of the visiting salesmen told me, “rub it in yer wife’s doo-dah.”

When I’d been there a few weeks, the chef left. He’d been mis-managing the accounts and all I remember is the boss saying “I’ll break his fucking legs!” I got shuffled into cooking the bar snacks, which I enjoyed—I didn’t have to do so many dishes.

When the new chef arrived, he taught me how to make white sauce and paté. He was a large man and liked to bang on the bench with a broad-heeled knife. He’d served on the QEII and cooked for the Queen. When the old marge tubs on the bench were full of waste, he’d ask me to “take out the gash.” He found a hunk of venison in the bottom of the freezer, which the previous chef hadn’t known what to do with, and made the most wonderful pies.

But somehow the job didn’t seem useful enough to me and I got work in a psychiatric hospital. When I left the pub, they gave me a St. Christopher’s medallion. I didn’t know what to do with it; I sold it as soon as I could.

I was her confidante
but when I left her employ
she said
there’s a lot of things
I could say

by Owen Bullock
Waihi, New Zealand

Patricia Prime & Catherine Mair: Uretara Estuary

2009-11-03T07:00:00.001-05:00

on the stop bank
wandering with the shadows
cast by clouds

We walk beside the estuary taking photographs of bird life: shags, herons, ducks, Canada geese, pied stilts and bitterns. Along the stop bank we meet a rat-poisoner and his wife laying bait among the reeds. "None of the bait has been taken," he says, "so we must be doing some good." About a kilometer along our path we come across a houseboat. A boy greets us from the top deck where he's fishing. In a small tree a thrush sings his heart out: his song never faltering as it changes from high to low, from a warble to a stream of sound.

calm lagoon—
a blue heron's
sudden flight

On the jetty across the river Christine tricks us into thinking she's a statue standing so still holding the long handle of her white-baiter's net. It is tempting to shout out, "Have you got any? How are they running?" But white-baiters are a secretive breed and rarely admit their success. We hope the bread we carry to feed the ducks isn't viewed as sustenance for the water rats. Coming towards us along the grassy path edged by flax is another walker with two fluffy white terriers. We pause for a brief chat about the pleasant change in the weather from yesterday's wind coming off the snow.

Look! there it is—
the bittern sculpture
on the opposite bank

It's a brisk walk back to the car. When we touch our cheeks, which feel hot and stinging, we find they are cold.

by Catherine Mair and Patricia Prime

Katikati, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand

and Auckland, New Zealand

Jeffrey Woodward: Woodberry Tavern

2009-10-31T07:00:00.000-04:00

wading into thick
cigarette smoke to the beat
of a jukebox
Brubeck and all that
old school jazz

The graying proprietor and his wife, too, were seated, more often than not, with a few aging cronies—familiar enough to extend an unending tab—around one circular table, a friendly lot, and cozying up in pairs for a night of Euchre or Canasta.

High ceilings of pressed, patterned tin and a long mahogany bar with a brass rail footrest from end-to-end, the taupe walls and beveled glass liquor cabinets of another era contrasted favorably with Mr. and Mrs. Woodberry—so much so, that after only a glass or two, one might penetrate that couple’s wrinkled exterior and perceive their hidden youth.
.

tequila straight
from the shot glass
with a little lemon
and salt for a chaser
our aqua vitae

One long and narrow room, with an entrance on Water Street and a door at the far back, the latter opening onto a screened wooden porch on stilts and a view of the river some 20 feet below—this is why our little band, barely legal, came to frequent the tavern that summer: to sit and watch the dark currents pass under our perch, there in our high nook and hideaway, to wake to life in that deliciously cool air of last light and to listen, in the silent intervals, to the bankside willows gather the wind.

a dark saying
of Hêrákleitos

is quoted
and thus translated floats
away with the river

the delicate girl
the brunette who wears
a flower in her hair
she is a bit mad perhaps

she looks like Ophelia

another round
of shot glasses stops
at our table
a chorus of mock-protest
from the girls in tight jeans

the Rokeby Venus
passionately praised
for line and color
we speak of Velásquez
as if he were of our crew

and so we drift along
pleasantly enough
no ferryman near

with his forbidding shadow

when we happily ship oars

by Jeffrey Woodward
Detroit, Michigan
first published in The Tanka Prose Anthology (2008)

Sharon Auberle: Storm

2009-10-28T07:00:00.000-04:00

All night a roaring of waves slamming onto the shore. All night a Wagnerian symphony of wind and water; now and then the thunder of a falling tree. I reach for you, burrowed deep under quilts. Through the night we lie there, listening, satiated with music of enormous gods. Finally, at dawn, the wind rests. Sun lifts over our porch, light gleaming like old coins spilled across the floor. At breakfast we watch heavy trucks rolling by, bearing broken limbs and trees. The sky is that color of diamond blue found only the morning after.

bodies of trees
their fragrance sweet
even in death

by Sharon Auberle
Sister Bay, Wisconsin

Ralph Murre: Canvas

2009-10-25T07:00:00.000-04:00

Route 31 buses pass like time in fog and the canvas waits, as I look at brushes and knives, put them back, squeeze a gob of payne’s grey and some pthalo blue on my palette, consider the quality of the ground, pour some turps, hold off on linseed oil, have a coffee. Look at that woman out the window. Stare at books I should read. Mix a touch of sienna into the too-bright blue. Go for a walk in a grey-wash afternoon, think of slicing into a tube of alizarin crimson, think of a friend whose crying-out-loud crimson slicing will someday end in another failure or, worse, success.

stretched canvas waits
for her pale body
the way I’ll paint her
the flake-white bed
from which she’ll rise

by Ralph Murre
Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin

Catherine Mair & Patricia Prime: The Ring of Fire

2009-10-22T07:00:00.000-04:00

Well what are we moaning about? We knew the forecast was poor. For goodness sake, it's not a tsunami! Think of Samoa—beautiful Samoa where many of its villages and resorts are a tangle of coconut palms, corpses and mud. "Talofa," they used to greet us, golden-skinned young women and men in their colourful sarongs. "Talofa," as we skipped down for breakfast.
.

hugging her teddy bear
she enchants
strumming guitarists

Friends, Heidi and Sam and their two children are asleep in their fale when they hear a noise like that of a jet plane zoom in from the sea. They look out to see the ocean receding. "Tsunami," Sam yells. "Get out quick, run to higher ground." They leave everything behind: passports, money, credit cards and clothes. Grabbing Misha's doll and Jake's toy car they run for their lives. The small girl clings to her father's back, while Jake is cradled in his mother's arms. When they reach the top of the hill, they are startled to see the devastation below. Where there once were sandy beaches, shelters and palm trees, there are piles of debris.

tidal wave—
a pleasure yacht
parked against a tree

by Catherine Mair and Patricia Prime

Katikati, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand

and Auckland, New Zealand

Review of Stanley Pelter’s SLIGHTLY SCENTED SHORT LIVED WORDS AND ROSES

2009-10-19T07:00:00.002-04:00

slightly scented short lived words and roses by Stanley Pelter. (George Mann Publications, Eaton, Winchester, Hampshire SO21 IES, UK. 2009). 140 pp. ISBN: 978-0-95608-743-0. Available from the author at 5 School Lane, Claypole, Newark, Lincolnshire NG 23 5BQ, U.K. A gift book except for the cost of the stamp – 1.50 pounds UK; 2 Euro – Europe; $10 USA and Rest of the World.

Reviewed by Patricia Prime

Stanley Pelter has produced a considerable body of haibun. This is his fourth collection. Puzzles, conundrums, pithy arguments —none of these terms describe the poems in slightly scented short lived words and roses. Reading these poems I pictured myself arriving at an amusement park, only none of the rides are familiar. I considered I could break my neck or be catapulted into the sky. It’s only poetry, I remind myself, and climb on board. I’m having fun, and I don’t want it to end. The poems are gimlet sharp. So much happens in their winding shapes: wit, sorrow, and an intelligence that nips and worries its subjects into giving up their full oddity and originality. The reader does not consume this poetry; instead, they are pinched and prodded towards revelation. Each neat poem is a Pandora’s Box full of wonderful surprises.

The experience of reading Pelter is of an extraordinarily powerful tension between the reference to recognizable experiences and images and a prosodic technique which keeps such moments constantly on the move. Here are some lines from the first haibun “a dense bell rings”:

crumpled beige sheets
squashed beneath a king size dusk
fearful shadows

another. then another. intense. dense resonance.

one clutch of women hide under a heaving king-size kissing bed. move slightly
apart. still young, one is slightly older. with effort she opens her eyes wide. then they close.

These lines posit a narrator in the midst of a room filled with a “king-size kissing bed” and numerous women. Who they are and what they are doing there is left to the reader’s imagination. A hospital? A convent? A concentration camp? We can only imagine. The flow from haiku to prose and a final tanka creates a strong notational effect as if the environment is being mapped subjectively: “that was all I heard about them.”

In “A Small Matter of Principle” the syntax, various type faces, tanka in italics etc. has the effect of destabilizing the narratives in the poem, allowing inner and outer categories to blend. The opening tanka,

dry dahlia dust
floats inside bathroom spray
scarab shadow forms
merge with her naked body
until nude

although standing as an entirely different image, is linked to the prose by the use of such words as “bathroom,” “naked” and “nude.” This juxtaposition suggests different layers of perception of the environment both as reality, but also as representation.

“answer or question” relies for its theme on several of Pelter’s main preoccupations: art, music and literature. The poem opens with a quote from Paul Valery, “’We should apologise for daring to speak about painting.’” The next few lines give a perspective on the scene where two people with different interests—“he talks painting she talks music” —come together to discuss their differences.

“blind id” is divided into four parts: young.blind, prime.blind, middle.blind and old.blind. “Blind” here seems irresistibly to stand for all the sensations one may be blind to throughout life” blind to love, to feeling, to hurt, to being old. The amalgam of prose passages and ribbon-like thread of musical allusions in the tanka and haiku, are beautifully integrated.

In “disconnected bits?” the more analytical awareness of tanka, prose and text is highlighted by being set in italics, and reveals that we are facing boundaries: perhaps those of outside vs inside, private vs public, and these boundaries breathe a profound level of control. The combination of outside (rain, snow) inside (a restaurant) refigures the meaning to suggest that the man “who smiles is absent” is remote in the sense of isolated, rather than simply separate. That this is linked with the notion of control suggests the boundaries operating within this scene and, perhaps enforced by the cold, the “wind-ordered shapes” and the destruction done by the birds, amount to a form of social control.

What this reading attempts to demonstrate is how Pelter’s writing simulates experience in this notational way, whilst also reminding the reader of the textuality of the presentation, through the shifting syntax and avoidance of strict boundaries in typography. The tight patterning of the haiku and tanka within the text is a foil to this effect. Phrases like “here is a once-in-a-lifetime chance of over-hearing table wood communicating with an old door bleached of suffocating paint” (“excoriation”) remind us of the mediated representation, and that language, as much as urban architecture, and Duchamp’s art work “Large Glass. ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even’” are a background of conflicting spaces, boundaries and perimeters of meaning. These elements linked to Pelter’s approach to his writing and the emphasis in composition of bricolage, all suggest that the best way of thinking about Pelter’s poetry is to read, reread, savour and enjoy it.

“1/2 Price Sale – up to 70% off” takes us into another realm of Pelter’s imagination – conversation. He is adept at revealing his characters through dynamically recording their outbursts. It takes movement, speed and duration to capture the spoken word in a series of short, staccato sentences, such as: “’Is it in the Sale? Don’t’ think it is. Leave it. I’ll come back. Need to be sure. Weight. Need to lose. Coffee in Debenhams?’”

For Pelter, movement is one of the real systems whose existence in fact makes up our lives and those of his characters. For example, in “house odours—a preparation” he notes the way in which a couple discuss why he should want to visit a house in which he lived for seven years, and in which an old girlfriend now lives:

“Yes, I visited. I did live there for seven years”.
“But why should an old girlfriend be living there? Why did she ask you to
visit? Why did you go?”
Nerves wedged between a cleaned car, memories of her special scent, how he would explain that he kissed her on both cheeks.

These distinctions in Pelter’s haibun provide a useful figure for thinking about his poetic practice in a way that addresses both its form and content. Pelter’s poetry can be thought of as a special practice that holds our interest by virtue of its collage means of composition – gathering textual paragraphs and juxtaposing them with restrained haiku and tanka – and the resulting textual effect of an energetic series of responses to landscape, city and environment. Pelter’s poetry seems to inscribe the way in which we lead our lives in small parcels of time and space.

The innovative nature of “inheritance” figures the innovative use of language that Pelter’s poems exhibit: the collapsing of phrase with phrase, bi-directional syntax, use of italics and capital letters are actions in language akin to the person’s hiking, painting experience. When the person arrives at a cottage door, asking where he might find a café, he is invited inside for tea. After some conversation, he discovers that his hostess has two addictions: the 1967, 6 day War, and teapots. Pelter’s use of language serves to defamiliarise the normative appearance and apparent function of the poem – suggesting the unusual experience of his protagonist.

In the lengthy poem “it’s an insult to pigs and a creative gay – it is their way,” it is the character’s combination of Old English and baby talk which first greets the reader

furste of tidal nighte
compleates weaves of dual soundes
sande sweeps wone away

Dear ickle Stanley, of atheist purity, lowliest member of numero uno dissenters difficult tribe of kreatiff skeptics, I will tells of a jaw-droppling and wondrous evente. After that, hush!

The omission of linking words such as prepositions, pronouns and conjunctions within or between sentences, the use of capital letters, bold typeface, italics and unusual spelling, gives the poem its extremely unusual appearance and show how Pelter’s writing both utilizes the language and opens it up to questioning:

Blankness. Time compresses. Suddenly absent. Lacerated space not hurriedly filled. Only a busy cube remains to stain silence.
Time to act. Time to time a top-toe to tiny exit.

stand apart from him
from across a shaken field
lambs bleat

Pelter took the photograph of the artist David Hockney that accompanies this poem. The drawing he was doing as they reminisced, was a 21st Birthday Present to Pelter’s son.

“of crustaceans who, too, get born” is illustrated with a photograph of the author. Here, Pelter expands on the prose-poem with his use of opening and closing haiku. This free-association piece is a personal take on the author’s love of nature.

The variety in page lay-outs which mark many of the poems, prose-poems and non-poems helps maintain the interest of the reader which might otherwise wander in patches where obscure facts predominate. Some passages appear in the traditional verse forms of haiku and tanka, others in the attractive scattered arrangement familiar to Pelter’s poems, and still others in paragraph form or in columns down the side of pages, the decisions about format setting seeming arbitrary at times, as the verses may be no more or less poetic than the paragraphs.

“one shoe one drawing only,” a poem divided into four sections, is probably one of my favourites. In it, Pelter writes about a mother’s drawing of a shoe, the shoe, and the “Grannymum” who brought up the child after the mother’s death: “Eight, and my present is a drawing”. The young child is given both the remaining shoe and the drawing: “Sitting on a floorcushion, legs apart, I look hard at them both, as I have many times. One shoe one drawing only. See nothing else.

black shine
of an unfashionable shoe
secrets”

“Pablo? Misunderstood misogynist? Never” – parts 1 and 2, are something of a meeting between the artist and the poet, the concrete with the abstract. The places where these things meet are in the world of forms and structures; Pelter’s poems explore these borderlands by crossing literary boundaries. In this excerpt we overhear part of a conversation between the artist and his model:

All my life I have loved women. LOVED them.
No. You have loved love of possessing, loved stupendous images
short-changed into everyday Creative sexual ownership.
You calling my drawings, my etched images OverTheTop?
You know what I mean. Let me put it another way. It’s as if . . .
Stop! Hair’s moving. Still! That’s better. Nearly finished . . . that’s it.

In these two poems Pelter comes from an interesting angle. Perhaps as a voyeur?

As we have seen, he is not afraid to step out of the boundaries of traditional haibun. His units of composition encompass prose paragraphs, poetry, fragments, and conversation. Often, the fragments form a story, sometimes with conversation between characters. The shorter pieces may consist of constellations of only a few sentences. It is worth quoting “phaaaaackorph” in full:

goes pfuukkorf fukkawf –
dat wat am ee says at dem
oo soe doo luvz im

Ee never did gave respect or no even disrespec. Wha ee an da gager
do is ‘dissing’ an abe reeee-spek. An wen ee’s face becum seerislee
contort ee can oonly screeeech owt doze sownnds. An dees sownds
are ‘fuaarkcough’ an ‘phaaaaackawph’. Dat am all.

There is still a work of interpretation for the reader here, but the effect is not one of alienation. The reader can choose any of several possible interpretations of this poem, it does not matter which, it is clear that an image of human failing is central.

The title poem, “slightly scented short lived words and roses,” a constellation of five paragraphs, dissolves the anxiety of interpretation because they can be held in the mind at the same time and produce a kind of sublime poem; the whole thing a fragile yet valid moment of insight.

Another poem in the book that I like very much is called “the short straw.” It is in three sections divided with numbers. The whole thing should be studied, but it ends:

Later, with shriveled pupils, she looks inside my eyes. Her
only visitor. I try to read between heavily smoked lines, wanting to gauge
slippage, diminution. Unfamiliar, it easily misinterprets into something
like shorthand of each Carer’s intentions. Want to return her to an
importance but it is too late to transcend her near completion. She asks
me to leave. “It is time”, she mumbles into a most minimalist of kitsch
smiles while pressing her Gift tight to a concealed breast, “to
sleep”.

clouds reshape
already a slow drift
into yesterday

That paragraph will be one of recognition for many readers who find themselves in the situation of a caring for a loved one and watching their slow decline.

In the true story of “3 died young” Pelter must have felt he had disastrous invisible, destructive powers on those young women he fell in love with. It is another lengthy poem, divided by numbers into 6 sections. These again are a montage of haiku, prose passages, various fonts and type faces. Often inside the paragraphs or sentences, there is a dreamlike slippage into different registers and realities. On page 120 we read:

She said “it is bound to happen. sudden attacks are no joke. it will
happen again”. told so worried family not to. safely over first twenty
year finishing line. why not more? “shall paint standing up till I die” i
tell them. “that’s what’s happening, more or less. ok, i’m not standing
up, or only paint, will bathe after one more best night ever. Just one
night more. three of us died young. chaos. no more here for you”.

sculpted frame
after a twosome night
she is painted out

The reference to “sudden attacks” forces the reader to focus on the fact that life passes quickly and one should make the most of time.

Pelter’s poem “yakshi” allows for periods of reflection and lyricism not bound by considerations of typography, variety of syntax, or font, which sometimes distract from the poetry. Here there is an interesting development in the theme of the young girl admiring a sensual Indian statue. The poem contains dream-like sequences and reflections, which are linked in ways that are not obvious, as the girl on an academic trip confronts a piece which she has only ever seen in books:

She steps forward. Foot touches a sculptured spirit of a carved woman with luscious means, a binding, entwining mango tree bursting into full flower filled. So it is told. So let it be written. So
she knows it, now, then, into always.

stone tree-woman
releases interned warmth
carved lips taste shapes

A yakshi is a specific form of sculpture of a goddess entwined into and with a mango tree – love/fertility/nature etc. They form a column of a temple (stupa). The reference at the bottom refers to a famous temple, carved from top to bottom. The bottom layer is of physical sex in all its manifestations, accepted with gratitude but the lowest level of awareness. Each level of sculptures reduces this area but increases the more spiritual nature of sex as an aspect of the creative process. The topmost layer is of the most sublime sculptures of women doing no more than, via finger movements and body positions, express where we may reach in terms of ‘beyond the human’ awareness.

For me, Pelter’s strength as a poet is in his unusual connections, his sharpened eye for detail and ear for conversation, and his loosely organized use of language. The poems clearly relate to the modernist current, yet are concerned with construction, understanding and meaning. Illustrated with photographs and Pelter’s quirky drawings, this is a wonderful book to read, reread and savour.

by Patricia Prime

Auckland, New Zealand

Albert DeGenova: Postcard from Napoli

2009-10-16T07:00:00.000-04:00

Train Rome to Naples, countryside covered in grapevines, orchards planted in careful rows, tomatoes already sprouting—the fields are planted around, along the hills, the sturdy thick farmers walk the hard ancient paths—cows and goats know more than they say—soil of these fields, layer after layer of fertile decay, generation upon generation of bones, olive pits, and grape stems—my peasant legs ache to walk these terraced hills, the stamina of time and grandfathers’ DNA—in our train compartment Cole sleeps, Max listens to his brother’s iPod, Eden reads Karma and searches for the goddesses, I write in a notebook—sharing our compartment an older Italian couple pours coffee from a thermos, fills water from a glass bottle into small paper cups, a roll of paper towels for wiping the man’s sweating bald head—I can smell the sweet juicy ripeness of the pear he slices with a well-used pocketknife, the handle smooth and black—

First view of the Mediterranean, walking the Napolitain shore, entranced by the fishermen—their dark suntanned skin cracked like worn canvas or bark or the seasoned hulls of their wooden boats—bare hands are forever leather gloves—folding, mending ancient nets—their boats insignificant against the expansive sea, mismatched to the heavy loads they drag out of the waves. Seaside café—I will eat fresh succulent pullipo, octopus in oil, lemon, and herbs.

Hands in the warm sea, Mediterranean sand under my fingernails, lose my breath, heart beats startled, unknown ghost or saint drifts up behind me—I have been homesick all of my life—this is where I want to die.

cedar roots
in limestone bluffs
ten thousand winds

by Albert DeGenova
Oak Park, Illinois

Chen-ou Liu: My Bird of Youth Has Left

2009-10-13T07:00:00.000-04:00

French dramatist Victor Hugo once said that forty is the old age of youth. I wholeheartedly agree with his words. After passing the age of forty, I have become more anxious about growing old. I used to be the black cloud; now, I'm turning gray. Time slips away, hair whitens, hands age, veins emerge, and wrinkles stamp the brows. The back begins to ache, teeth become loose, and the voice gets hoarse, a charming quality to some and the roughness of age to others. Furthermore, the body grows dry and liable to fracture, and one day it will no longer respond.
.

looking out
bare maple branches
in the breeze—
mortally wounded
waving goodbye

by Chen-ou Liu
Ajax, Ontario, Canada

Gary LeBel: Humpty

2009-10-10T07:00:00.002-04:00

I shake it. It makes a feeble sound like an ant’s complaint. I pour it out onto the table where it breaks into a pile of noise, and like Humpty Dumpty, there’s no putting it back together again, with everything jumbled sideways, mixed up, broken, strings merely tuning,

so I let it go and grab a different box,

shake it, spill the contents, look through shards of noise,

choose one,

start writing.

split indifferently
by a seedling
stone

by Gary LeBel
Cumming, Georgia

Bob Lucky: Night Market

2009-10-07T07:00:00.001-04:00

The Ningxia Street night market is a jumble of hawkers and customers, the hum of propane burners, the clack-clack of spatulas in woks, and a thousand conversations.

legs dangling
from a plastic stool
a little girl
concentrates on her skewer
of candied tomatoes

Making our way through the crowd, we buy various types of flatbreads, oyster mushrooms breaded and deep-fried, kebabs and sausages.

on the altar
of a local shrine
an egg tart—
at last a god
to my liking

by Bob Lucky
Hangzhou, China

Tish Davis: Refrain

2009-10-04T07:00:00.000-04:00

Dusk mutes green and all of green’s variations. Along the path, bare feet press the sheen out of damp clover. White blossoms of blackberries pop-out left and right. Even the oxeye daisies abandon their yellow.

candlelight
the bride’s father
steps back

by Tish Davis
Dublin, Ohio

Richard Straw: Stronger Grip

2009-10-01T07:00:00.001-04:00

On a Sunday morning, dad's sitting in a private hospital room by a sunlit window. He tells me his doctors have agreed to let him use a chair even though he can't get out of it by himself. He says they haven't decided yet whether to do more cutting or more chemotherapy or nothing at all: "But they'll get paid whatever they do . . ."

I tell him that I have to hurry back to the airport for a midday flight. Then I reach for his hand, and we play an old game: "Who has the stronger grip?" This time, I let him win. I try to smile as I say, "Bye, take care."

Outside his room, a medication nurse listens to me stammer, "Check . . . him . . . make sure . . . doesn't fall . . ." But I can't complete a sentence.

I rush into a bathroom and begin sobbing. I continue to cry in the empty elevator, then in the rental car all the way to the airport, quieting finally on the packed plane.

Easter snapshot
a boy and his dad
cast one shadow

by Richard Straw
Cary, North Carolina
first published in bottle rockets #19, August 2008

Dru Philippou: Nostos

2009-09-28T07:00:00.001-04:00

Open the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and enter the Nysian meadow, naming roses, crocuses, and beautiful violets . . . irises too, and hyacinths. Avoid narcissus, that sweet temptation, unless you want a seat at Haides’ banquet. If you have time, pass by the olive-trees bearing their splendid fruits, and you’ll hear Persephone’s echoing cries.

he clasps the maiden
tightly in his chariot
the four black steeds
gallop back to the palace
of dust and ashes

growing used
to his ways, and
his three-headed hound,
she stokes the flickering
fires of oblivion

the dark-haired lord,
on an ebony throne,
polishes his helmet
while Demeter braids
a wreath for his door

the taste
of the seed seals
Persephone’s fate:
misty darkness
and vines of the earth

.
Matter in italics is borrowed from “The Homeric Hymns” by A. N. Athanassakis

by Dru Philippou
Taos, New Mexico

Gary LeBel: Marked Down

2009-09-25T07:00:00.002-04:00

On one side of it hang small wooden clothes hangers, demure and down-turning like an old maid’s shoulders. On the other half is a row of four drawers, each decorated with a covering of fine silk cloth,

the digs, dents and scratches in its riveted wood exterior, each well-earned, each with a story,

the bristling palms of a sea-windy latitude, a dollop of soft language, silk ties and tailored shirts,

ice in amber liquids, the scent of cardamom in Turkish coffee, the spoon-tinkled china half-filled with milky tea, an intricate lace doily beneath the ‘ever so’ inflections of the young woman above,

a world traveler’s home away from home bouncing up the gangway on a lean coolie’s back,

or the truncheon blows of pistons and the slow grinding argument of wheel and rail,

the vast undifferentiated poor that live between points of interest,

who serve the tea, speak the pretty words, lug the luggage, wash the lavatories, shine the shoes and clear the tables of still-warm food:

the turn-of-the-century steamer trunk and the Old World trapped inside it

just marked down to fifty dollars

in the thrift shop.

whistle-stop—
drinking from a gully
the three-legged dog

by Gary LeBel

Cumming, Georgia

Tish Davis: Gesso

2009-09-22T07:00:00.000-04:00

He's an artist, still asleep under the quilt. Last night's shoes and clothes are scattered, leaving a trail back to the kitchen. I've found his robe and with my coffee enter the studio just as the morning light slowly edges along the face of each canvas hanging on the wall.

Definitely talented. I study each painting—oils, abstract, subtle. There’s a common theme including this blank surface now drying on the easel. The staples—notched along the sides—are diagonal, haphazard.

dimming the lights
the bust of Caesar
back on the bookshelf

by Tish Davis
Dublin, Ohio
first published in Contemporary Haibun Online, V4, N1, March 2008

Bob Lucky: The Shuffling Blues

2009-09-19T07:00:00.000-04:00

This morning I roll out of bed with sore hips and limp to the toilet. Surely I’m not as old as I feel, though a glance in the mirror is inconclusive.

the older I get
the weaker my sense
of immortality—
the heart carved in the trunk
stretched to the bursting point

No pension to speak of, no money sense, no hope of a hefty inheritance—I will die in harness like an old workhorse. To my wife, I’ll leave a mixed bag of memories; to my son, shoes that I pray do not fit.

by Bob Lucky
Hangzhou, China

Jeffrey Winke: Part of the Grand Design

2009-09-16T07:00:00.000-04:00

A short skirt is a promise. Nothing more, nothing less. Guys view promises as sacred trusts; women know promises can easily evaporate, like spilled water in a desert. She wears a short skirt, shear black lacy leggings, and tiny alligator-skin boots that look clunky, but stylish. Her eyes scan the room as she enters. She’s a collector. Her collection: hopeful stares of men. The quartet plays “Eye of the Tornado”—how fitting. Hancock becomes her soundtrack. Scrambled sax and piano—primal brass and sophisticated ivory. There is the usual assortment of guys with dopey, boyish grins. The boyish-grin-thing only works when there’s a bit of mischief in the eyes. Altar boys never get laid, but boys in detention do. She saunters to the bar with hip swivel to shorten a few breaths. Leaning forward as though she were about to whisper a secret to the bartender, she asks for the best cognac. Some guy—nameless and faceless—will pay. She’s an anomaly. Young, attractive women don’t drink top-shelf cognac. And they don’t frequent jazz clubs. She’s part of the grand design. Heaven sent. A holy attempt to spark the spirits of middle-aged men trapped in the mundane. The bottle of booze left at the recovering alcoholic’s door with the anonymous Merry Christmas card—God’s doing. The mailman accidently delivering the neighbor’s copy of Mothering magazine to the couple desperately trying to get pregnant—God did it. All the boxes filled with past expiration date food handed out to the hungry and homeless—yep, God’s work.

scratch off—
one number shy
of the big win

by Jeffrey Winke
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Stanley Pelter: sonata

2009-09-13T07:00:00.002-04:00

mist eases
below a windbreak hawthorn
an alphorn grips air

forest walk. struggle. climb over mutilated trees, snap detached branches, crunch muddied twigs. from inside leaves, lighter than sun dried sounds, we hear a minor key drift of sad adagio notes grow sadder.
.

town based lovers
somewhere lips dedicate
to piccolo thrills

by Stanley Pelter

Claypole, Lincolnshire, England

Sharon Auberle: Musca Domestica

2009-09-10T07:00:00.001-04:00

When you investigate my juicy plum, when you walk the rim of my Riesling, when you buzz me, gleefully, in the middle of a nap, I try, O fly, to dig deep into the Buddha corners of my heart and find the sanctity of every living thing, though I have great difficulty with mosquitoes as well, not to mention earwigs . . . but I digress. In spite of your fondness for all things revolting, I want to spare you, really I do. You, with your Kafkaesque legs and eyes, even my pen you explore! Is there any place you dare not? But heed this warning, O small one: when you walk about on my paper, rubbing those questionable feet above my fresh poem, then, my inquisitive little friend, you are history.

afternoon
one fly
on the pane

.
by Sharon Auberle
Sister Bay, Wisconsin

Gary LeBel: The Stars Misplaced

2009-09-07T07:00:00.004-04:00

“...I wanna hear and see / everything...”

Jimi Hendrix, Up from the Skies

The rainy scent of the Tennessee Mountains on a May evening floods the interstate—the traffic is light, the pace unhurried and leisurely, a drive I’ve made at least a hundred times.

A late eighties station wagon, a Dodge I think, pulls out in front of me. There’s something odd about this car: it’s transporting a body.

But the surprise of a body bag in full view doesn’t immediately sink in. What fascinates me even more is the driver.

He has a full head of thick white hair, slicked back and shining, not a strand out of place, late middle age, a dapper man, like the one who never talks in film noire. Though his window’s down, the hair doesn’t budge. His hands are long and slender, feminine. His taut pink skin looks shrink-wrapped over his high forehead and prominent cheekbones; his crisp white dress shirt matches his hair. This man doesn’t nail boards together on his days off. I’ll call him Charon, after the Greek underworld’s infamous chauffeur.

He looks straight ahead, leaning forward into the steering wheel with a grip that would put the Ancient Mariner’s to shame. The head of the corpse is less than six inches from his lap. To picture this fully you must imagine an old green station wagon, mostly windows. A juryrigged, makeshift stretcher lies in the center where the middle seats should be. I had always thought these kinds of ‘deliveries’ were shielded from the public eye behind pleated gray curtains but every day’s an education.

I watch the wind blow eerily through the bag, alternately expanding and deflating, rippling at times from head to toe. When it collapses, the nose and feet protrude.

In fact, I’m chasing them, increasing my speed as Charon does, passing when he passes, pulling in again right behind him, though I keep my distance. I can’t take my eyes off that immaculate hair, the resolute, forward gaze or the rippling body bag foreshortening feet-first a few yards in front of me like Mantegna's Dead Christ.

But not for a second do I feel the slightest morbidity in this game. To me there’s no one else on the highway; I’m welded to this moment by curiosity alone. It’s death and its business-as-usual aftermath I’m seeing, as plain as a cinderblock: no tears, no flowers, no hearts being weighed by Thoth, just someone’s fate and another’s job. What coin beneath the eyes, I wonder, nickel, peso, drachma?

After miles of this close pursuit, Charon shoots abruptly off the interstate toward one of those small Tennessee towns with a Native American name, his taillights swallowed by the exit ramp and the hips of crouching mountains. In truth, I could have turned off and followed him.

Their faces tonight

............after thirty odd years in the bellies of ships,

some who met the ‘blue-eyed boy’

............and those

who followed Jonah.

by Gary LeBel

Cumming, Georgia

first published in Abacus (2008)

Benita Kape: Unveiling Day

2009-09-04T07:00:00.000-04:00

Some months before the full year has passed, the family make plans. The plaque for the grave—this will be kept simple. Two river stones and the plinth on which they stand collect lichen for under these stones our infant son has laid for forty years. All must be spruced up for the occasion; yet in time lichen will return to run over and around the shells that, like an ancient language, inscribe the surface of the stones.

It is the custom of the people that one year following the burial or, at a time suitably close to the first anniversary of that day, a ritual will take place. A plaque will be placed, in this case on the plinth beside our son's. Late in the day, the Stone Mason will complete his work. A cloak will then be reverently arranged and cover all while awaiting the final service.

moonlight
leaves
lightly falling

A year ago, it had been difficult to say goodbye. A circle of a year and the immediate family invite the wider circle of family and friends to gather. There will be prayers and readings; these are a people whose orations are renowned. In the bitter cold of a winter's day, those gathered draw in closer. Kuia nod in respect as the first speaker is motioned forward by the minister. Our surviving son begins in Te Reo. Discreetly given notice earlier by his sisters, "Don't you keep us out here in the cold too long."

near the cemetery
turning back
for a bouquet

And though he forgoes the whakapapa that was recited at the tangi, those present listen intently as he describes a meeting with a clairvoyant over the past few days. Unexpected perhaps, though strangely comforting, as we all gather strength to move on. The forthright eyes of an elder, my husband in air-force uniform, smile back at us from a ceramic photo on the plaque as the cloak is drawn aside. "This was the blanket briefly laid but forever to keep him warm," a niece of Rongowhakatau iwi declares on the minister's final blessing. Leaving the cemetery, we sprinkle water over our heads and rinse our hands at the gate handbasins.

unveiling day
old notes, new notes
in our waiata

Notes

Unveiling = a custom of the Maori people of New Zealand.
Kuia = the women elders.
Te Reo = the Maori language.
whakapapa = the names and relationship of the extended families (whanau).
tangi = funeral
waiata = song
Rongowhakatau = one of many tribes on the East Coast
iwi = tribe

by Benita Kape
Gisborne, New Zealand

Dru Philippou: Hipólito, the Herder

2009-09-02T10:19:00.001-04:00

with his crook
he navigates
the rough terrain
early bluegrass
and white clover

villagers liken
the shepherd to
ruddy-limbed Pan
piping to nymphs
nearby a spring

rustic viands
for his fare
and tinkling bells
the heavenly sleep
of the herder

Go down from the trail over the matted dried grass up along the fence; pass the long oblong water trough to the cedar in the distance, shading the grave with a red and yellow tulip. “I planted the bulbs last year!” says a friend. The sheepherder, Hipólito, is buried here. I can still read his name and dates, 1912-1971, carved on the cross. Nothing else is known about him, but hikers are often told, “Go by Hipólito’s grave.”

by Dru Philippou
Tao, New Mexico
first published in Modern English Tanka V3, N 4 (2009)

Gary LeBel: Curve

2009-08-29T07:00:00.001-04:00

Today in the North Georgia mountains the sun’s straight up, school’s out—boarded-up shops and broken soda machines, filling stations with no tanks or recent calendars: all wait their turn to disappear under the great sleepy eyelids of kudzu and cicadas.

Two young boys are following railroad tracks between mountains, one of them short, the other taller by a foot. It’s all there on four legs, their youth and friendship, the boundless summer stretching out ahead of them somewhere down the tracks as the tall one leans over the shorter who tilts his head to cock an ear.

‘Whither do they go,’

...............vanishing side-by-side,

...........................train rails

...............and the bend

...........................of a river?

by Gary LeBel

Cumming, Georgia

first published in Abacus (2008)

Sharon Auberle: Summer Passing

2009-08-26T07:00:00.001-04:00

.
The sky is filled with terns tonight, their red bills arrowing down into the water. Fishing boats wend their way home to the harbor, while on the dock a small boy runs, heedless of dark and danger. His father scoops him up at the edge. Old men sit alone. Two women wrap shawls about their white shoulders. For a moment, there is silence, all pausing to watch an impossibly pink moon rise up out of the lake. Lights are coming on, one by one, in the deserted streets. Even the corner tavern is quiet, and the wind, thinking of turning northward, stills itself for awhile.
.

from somewhere
on the other side of the world,
autumn approaches

.
by Sharon Auberle
Sister Bay, Wisconsin

Patricia Prime: The Hand Press

2009-08-23T13:33:00.002-04:00

.
My fiancé kept a hand printing press in his bedroom. He was a printer by trade and bought the press to make extra money. Two nights a week were spent printing invitations, business cards and letterheads.

The moveable metal type was kept in small boxes, each letter taken out individually and arranged into lines to form text, headings, captions. After the type was set and tightened, it was tapped into place. The paper was fed into the machine and rollers spread the ink under the pressure of the press. Several proofs had to be "run off" to ensure even coverage, clean print and correct order of type, which was positioned in a "mirror image"—something a skilled compositor could do in minutes.

winter evening

the smell of chemicals

drifts from the window

the cat is stirred

from her sleep on the tiles

.
My task was to clean and "break" the type after the job was completed. Each letter had to be cleaned and placed back in the correct tray which was a lengthy and tedious process.

.
My future mother-in-law kept a wary eye on us. She'd interrupt every half-hour or so, with tea, a plate of biscuits, or a stern warning it was time for me to go. All this subterfuge to mask her worry over what—disguised by the clunk of heavy machinery—might be taking place in the bedroom.

up and down the stairs

weathered floorboards

thud beneath the press

as she retrieves

cups and plates

After washing with industrial soap it was time to leave the room smelling of chemicals and ink. Cards laid out on the drying stacks. We walked home hand-in-hand.

.
low in the sky

a crescent moon

bright and shiny

like the letter 'C'

in the compositor's tray

.
by Patricia Prime
Auckland, New Zealand
first published in Modern English Tanka V3, N1 (Autumn 2008)

Gary LeBel: Moso

2009-08-20T07:00:00.004-04:00

It’s suddenly evening as you slip out of the bright afternoon and into the bamboo’s dark, luxuriant corridors. With so little light reaching in, you sense the leaves drink deeply of every available ray of sunlight to grow such densely interwoven canopies above. The shaded paths between the clusters of Moso are softly cushioned with years upon years of cast-off leaves, and so your footsteps hardly make a sound.

Introduced originally from China, and then via San Francisco in 1893, their provenance adds an unexpected dimension to what at first was merely a name on an exit sign: “Bamboo Farm and Coastal Gardens”, a large hidden tract maintained by the University of Georgia on the outskirts of Savannah.

The little bamboo forest enclaves, each autonomous, are strung together over the acreage like a chain of islands. Wandering among them, you move from one country to another rather than merely between species. Part-time resident of the nation of Black Bamboo, an egret lends an exquisitely-wrought tension to the moment as it darts stealthily in slow motion along the grassy shore, its bleary reflection keeping abreast on the mill weed below.

a quiet pond . . .

minnows swimming

through my eyes

by Gary LeBel

Cumming, Georgia

Giselle Maya: Summer Breeze

2009-08-17T07:00:00.000-04:00

at noon

it rises out of thin air

and glides

from afar

into the garden

through the valley wind sifts pollen

from the vessels of daylilies

and ruffles the cat’s tigered fur

white roses sigh near yellow evening primroses

corn leaves tremble and grow by leaps and bounds

zucchini blossoms of orange-yellow

cradle within green

where

does the glaucous

summer breeze

come from

where will it go

beans with white and violet blossoms tousled by wind’s fingertips

bow again and again how do they spin tiny beans out of blossoms

the tall borage with prickly leaves etches blue stars

the rose called ‘Joseph’s Coat’ is painted in shades

from lemon to wine-red

the feathers of nightingales are brushed

they lift their voices

in the high willow

in a hammock

the gardener closes her eyes

soothed

after sifting dark earth

to nourish growing plants

blue-green silk

noon wind

ripples water

content

to be alive

by Giselle Maya

Saint Martin de Castillon, France

Francis Masat: Everyone’s Going West

2009-08-14T07:00:00.001-04:00

“Go West, young man!”

—John B. Soule, Horace Greeley, Thomas Fuller and possibly others, ca. 1851.

The Midwest: My high school sweet-heart moves to California; other friends move to Colorado and Oregon. My high school drops band, the football team now is eight-man, and the track team is co-ed. The movie theater, two schools, and the variety and drug stores close. The library—my Mecca—struggles to stay open. A local rumor is that we are experiencing progress.

empty street—

the rolling cadence

of a beer can

So now, where do I go to see theater and opera, to visit history, to live art, or to use gateways to old world cultures? I realize that I must leave too. With everyone going West, I head East.

Dad’s workshop—

cobwebs fill the arches

of a child’s castle

by Francis Masat

Key West, Florida

Benita Kape: Shoe Shopping

2009-08-11T07:00:00.001-04:00

Winter school holidays—my two great-grandsons are in town to stay with their Daddy. I take them, as I do every year, to the movies. And then we go shopping—a few clothes and always a pair of brand new shoes.

early spring

following a plow barefoot

planting potatoes

Times were hard. A large garden plot near the house supported the family. But in order to stretch the budget just that bit further my father grew seasonal crops. If we were big enough to bend and pick up a potato, we were big enough to put it in a sack. Some years we planted onions on the shortest day of the year. On the longest day, we helped our father and siblings harvest them. Another time the crop my father planted would be peas. He would provide much of these harvests to the grocers in the two local townships. But on occasion, he dealt these vegetables to his neighbours for items of use for his family.

carried to bed—

new second-hand, toe-worn

shoes and tears

by Benita Kape

Gisborne, New Zealand

Catherine Mair & Patricia Prime: Chinese Checkers

2009-08-08T07:00:00.003-04:00

On my arrival the remnants of a party: balloons on the veranda, a piece of chocolate cake in the pantry, birthday cards on the dresser and toys spread over the floor. The children play with cars on the carpet, making roads and roundabouts with coloured clothes pegs. Later I offer to baby-sit the children while my friend and her daughter visit great-grandma. They decide to take the oldest boy with them.

wide-eyed she welcomes her visitors

The youngest two occupy themselves with the road works, but when they become bored I play "Hangman" with them using simple three- and four-letter words. Next they want to play "Chinese Checkers," which lasts until they realize they are going to be beaten. As we play hide-and-seek in the bedroom, a Selwyn's friend spies us through the window. When the resthome visitors return it's time for dinner.

in the bath

four arms, four legs,

a monster

Next morning the family packs up leaving the house empty and quiet. Thistledown floats across the rain-drenched sun deck.

folding the washing

we find a pair

of boy's socks

by Catherine Mair and Patricia Prime
Katikati, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand
and Auckland, New Zealand

Tish Davis: The Family Vitaceae

2009-08-05T07:00:00.002-04:00

Clusters of grapes are stenciled on a periwinkle watering can in my aunt’s kitchen. Two rusted hand pruners and the old rosewood harvesting shears, tips in the tin, point down.

“Do you remember your grandmother’s vineyard?”

I remember the weekends . . . . Father took a cotton rag and wiped grease off of the old, red tractor while my uncles gathered tools and loaded everyone onto the trailer. Grandmother, always a few rows ahead of us, trimmed and composted in calico dress and barn boots. My aunts said she brought secrets with her—cuttings from the old country.

Grapes, at harvest time, were packed in wooden crates, loaded onto flatbeds with wooden rails. We cousins played a game of chase alongside the procession. Berries jiggled in boxes. I stopped and pulled the beggar-ticks out of my socks.

frozen on the vine

the grapes

my father grew

by Tish Davis

Dublin, Ohio

first published in Presence #38, May 2009

Tad Wojnicki: Boutique Row

2009-08-02T07:00:00.001-04:00

Cannery Row is shop-crazy. I skip the trinketry, chocolatery, and gadgetry, and then hop past the batikry, crotchetry, and towelry. A far cry from John Steinbeck. I schlep on. Now, Steinbeck arrives: Steinbeck Golf, Steinbeck Cooking College, and Steinbeck Fold and Fluff. Of course, also a Steinbeck Speakeasy—Steinbeck here, Steinbeck there, Steinbeck everywhere.

I schlep down Cannery Row.

I don't see a single cannery, much less a row, or hear the famous, ear-splitting whistle calling the fish cutters, staggering out of their tortilla flats. Years ago, by this time of day, all boats would have been in. The stinko gulch would be swarming with minimum-pay workers, Dead fish would make it alive. But today, the fish is gone. Fished out. With the fish, that life is gone, too—no warehouses, no whorehouses, no flophouses. No “reduction” plants around either, baking fish heads, tails, and guts into a fertilizer. When they cleaned the tanks, "the stench was so horrible it would wake one up in the night," Joe Bragdon, who lived here as a young man, told me. Today, no whistles, no stench, no canners --and no fish to can, either. Cannery Row is now a Boutique Row. Sale signs go up left and right. Staffs drag schlock to the sidewalk to trip the walker.

antiques shop

in snakeskin shoes

a shiny penny

I gulp my gall and join the fun. Fog helps, cottoning rough stuff, fuzzing strife, padding junk. Even the roars and vrooms get muffled, stifled, smothered. Soles smooth sidewalks to sumptuous breakfasts of coffee with bacon, waffles with shrimp, and croissants with chorizo, all treyf stuff.

I step into a joint that doesn't reek treyf. It's the Steinbeck Speakeasy. They serve dinner for breakfast. I don’t want anything to eat. No chow, just spirits. I plop down at the bar and get a shot of kosher vodka straight. The barfly next to me is a Kentucky businessman dispossessed by his wife.

beach bar

fog engulfs

each stool

"Headlights on!" a man at the door yells, tilting his head toward the parking lot. "Who drives a Porsche?" he adds, looking around. No guest is getting up. No one drinking at the bar drives a Porsche.

"Our dishwasher," the bartender yells back.

The barfly leans over.

"Don't you miss the good old days?” he asks.

“What ‘good old days’? Days of low pay? Days of indignity? Days of filth, stink, and discomfort? Were those days ‘good days,’ you think?” "I'm not so sure they were," I recall Joe Bragdon, thinking back.

weedy wave

the pelican picks

the splash

I quit the Steinbeck Speakeasy and join a wedding party at the Lover's Point. Gooseflesh dads and teeth-chattering moms join too, praying the fog would lift. A stretch limo pulls over. The bride gets out, breast-feeding a baby. Suddenly, so honest. So Steinbeck. So Cannery Row.

pebbles rattle

crushed under driftwood

beach wedding

by Tad Wojnicki

US/Taiwan

[Previously published as: "Boutique Row: Idiosyncratic Reflections of a Steinbeck Aficionado," in: 2008 NCUE Third Annual Conference on Language Teaching, Literature, Linguistics, Translation, and Interpretation. Chang Hua, Taiwan, 2008.]

Marleen Wenneker-Hulst: King Crabs

2009-07-30T07:00:00.001-04:00

My husband is glancing through some travel guides when he says: ‘Listen, one of the must-do activities in Honningsvåg is a King Crab Safari’. I can hear the excitement in his voice from the way he pronounces King Crab Safari. ‘During a spectacular three hour long excursion you will go out to sea in a Zodiac and search for the famous king crabs’, he reads out loud. ‘Afterwards, a delicious crab meal is prepared.’

His index finger taps on a picture of a lady holding a giant crab above her head.

‘These monsters can reach a width of two meters and weigh as much as fifteen kilo’, he continues, as if he wants to impress me. I study the photograph that could easily be a scene from a horror movie, and think of something to say.

waking up—

not a spider but a spot

seen through glasses

by Marleen Wenneker-Hulst

Musselkanaal, the Netherlands

Jeffrey Winke: How It Smells and Feels

2009-07-27T07:00:00.001-04:00

They create an aesthetically-pleasing, harmonious pattern. Neatly stacked columns. These wooden palettes are tethered tightly to the flatbed heading at a timetable’s ordained speed on this concrete interstate. The palettes are brand new. Direct from the factory where the construction pattern is followed in endless repetition to form their universal shape. The pinewood is so fresh that one can imagine how it smells and feels, the splinters lodging themselves in the top layers of skin, even in tough calloused hands. No scuff marks from forklift drivers fatigued from late night drinking. No grease stains from used machine parts carelessly tossed during quick repairs. No sticky spills from tipped-over Big Gulp-size Mountain Dews, carelessly kicked over as the foreman scatters lounging workers with a “getbacktowork” growl. These pristine, sculpturally perfect palettes are on their way to some company where they will be weighted down with the industrial output of a fair day’s work.

fresh scent

in the laundry basket

a cat

by Jeffrey Winke

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Ralph Murre: In Apartment 3-B

2009-07-24T07:00:00.001-04:00

where wall meets ceiling

a gossamer web

on spackled plaster

O.K., first off, she wasn’t “Little,” they just called her that to be funny, the way you called the shortest kid in your sophomore phys-ed class “Stretch.” At 398 lbs., when she wasn’t retaining water, Miss Tiffany L. Muffet would not have fit on your average tuffet even if she did have some idea what it was. It is true that she was eating a tub of extra-creamy cottage cheese (technically, curds and whey) and a 32 oz. bag of Doritos with Skippy and was washing it all down with a 7-11 Big Gulp, when a rather demure, grayish spider descended, yes, more or less beside her. But “frightened her away” ??? Please. On the day in question, Tiffany Muffet, barely looking up from a re-run episode of “Conditioning Hints of America’s Biggest Losers Contestants,” grudgingly pushed aside a Double Whopper she was saving for after the show, rolled up a copy of the Enquirer which was close at hand, and splattered that little sumbitch all over the dark-walnut veneer of the pressed-wood headboard that would be hers with just three more payments.

by Ralph Murre

Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin

Bob Lucky: Missing

2009-07-21T07:00:00.001-04:00

“Neil!” she yells from the center of the playground, “Neil!” It’s late afternoon, almost dusk, the swing sets and slides are deserted, all the children home for dinner except this one, Sadie, searching for her brother. “Neil!” she calls out one more time, scanning the playground. “He disappears everywhere,” she explains.

.
deepening shadows a small hand of green bananas

.
by Bob Lucky
Hangzhou, China

Ruth Holzer: Pirmasens Caserne

2009-07-18T07:00:00.001-04:00

For a year before we found a house to rent near the army base, we stayed in a room in the enlisted men’s barracks. All our household goods were in storage up in Hamburg; we lived out of the suitcases we had brought over on the flight. I relished the freedom from domestic duties; while my husband was at work, I’d explore the valley and the dense surrounding forests of fir and pine. At night we’d drive through the countryside, over the border, into France.

in the dryer
the thump
of combat boots

by Ruth Holzer
Herndon, Virginia

Robert Moyer: Hungarian Pastry Shop

2009-07-15T07:00:00.002-04:00

Butterflies and brioche, cinnamon raisin rolls and creamcheese Danish, hammentaschen and croissants, still in patient rows on pans behind the counter, waiting for an Eastern European girl to slip one onto a plate, turning my first name into an inflected query—“Bahb?”—delivering the pastry with a cup of caffeine and whipped cream from an exotic origin—Hungarian, Viennese, Russian. Intellectual crumbs collected at local colleges fall out of conversations around the room, some splayed on the bathroom wall celebrating dead philosophers, excoriating live politicians, all fueled by the bottomless pot of coffee on the burner in the center of the room. Every now and then a blast of cold air makes its way through the door to the back of the room, as the Shop’s legion of customers parades in and out under the red and white striped awning, the lettering faded now.

.
a man and woman
at our old table
not touching

.
by Robert Moyer
Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Katherine Samuelowicz: How Is She I Wonder

2009-07-12T07:00:00.003-04:00

travelling to work on the dew-washed morning by bus on the route I never take by car I recognise this house now comfortably nesting among grownup trees lush green feeding on the recent rains fitting so well into the neighbourhood that grew around it

how is she

I wonder

this other me

living with my ex-husband

in this house we never bought

by Katherine Samuelowicz

Brisbane, Qld., Australia

Dru Philippou: Counterpoise

2009-07-09T07:00:00.002-04:00

oriental boxes of sesame seeds, wild rice, and mung beans

behind the glass of wall-to-wall red lacquer cabinets

with Chinese red, minor accents are crucial

a bottle of yellow-green olive oil

............on the black marble countertop

a set of red pearl ginger jars subdued in a corner

a stainless steel stove reflects the random arrangement of lemons

............on the long oak table

the kitchen window

which takes up the entire south wall

............pulls the warm interior

to the cool exterior

of ocean blue

........................wave after wave

........................on his surfboard

........................a boy

by Dru Philippou

Taos, New Mexico

Bob Lucky: On a Journey

2009-07-06T07:00:00.001-04:00

door open door closed no door wherever I am says Kabir an entry point but I can’t get a handle on it turning this way turning that until turning becomes a circle the circle a trap the trap a door always open always closed

broken clouds
my head against
the bus window

by Bob Lucky
Hangzhou, China

Roger Jones: Old Man

2009-07-03T07:00:00.001-04:00

Dad had taken me to have my hair cut short. “He keeps trying to look like a Beatle,” he told the chuckling barber.

Afterwards, in the car, I hid my head under a baseball cap.

Backing out of the slot, Dad slammed his brakes. My cap flew off. A long-haired teenager wheeling past behind him on a bike screamed, “Watch where you’re goin’, old man!”

"Old man?" -- I'd never thought of my father as old.

Forty years ago, and Dad a decade younger than I am now.

day after day
wheeling by—
this same blue sky

by Roger Jones
New Braunfels, Texas
first pubished in Frogpond 29:3 (Autumn 2006)

Ruth Holzer: Bitche

2009-06-30T07:00:00.001-04:00

The citadel dominates the town, now as in years past, giving the appearance of protection, if not the reality. The town’s a stony place, catering to soldiers. I came to know several families there. During the war they had fled to Provence, where the Italian occupation forces helped them hide and survive. When they returned, they had to go from house to house to retrieve their furniture from the neighbors.

ghosts in the hills—
swift night descends again
upon Lorraine

by Ruth Holzer
Herndon, Virginia

Garry Eaton: Roach

2009-06-27T07:00:00.004-04:00

Occasionally, one will launch across an open space, and bury itself in a crack or crevice. Quicker than the eye can see. Almost. But I sense them there, all around me, in their ugly millions.

infiltrated and resigned

in the great cities

the porous suburbs

Though getting rid of them is hopeless, once in awhile I make a sweep of the neighborhoods, taking down numbers. In a dishwasher's apron that once was white, I get to my knees on the duckboard, and peer under the food prep tables, under the grill, the fridges, the salad bar, and beyond, into the hellish, inaccessible spaces where greasy splatters and half-cooked bits of meat tend to fall when things get hot and heavy in the kitchen. And yes, I can see them there, another population explosion, breeding like cockroaches! However, I am in control here. This extermination will proceed my way, safely and efficiently.

I cover all the food trays, dishes, steel tables, grills and sinks. I close the cupboards, clear the runways, turn on the fans, break out the spray bombs, and don the death mask. Hardened by experience, I get down quickly to this necessary and inevitable destruction, and before you can say 'Hank Greenburg,' I have overwhelmed the favorite haunts, dare I say the ghettos, of my enemies with a devastating blitz.

the fog of war

no telltale press, no monuments

to the battle

At first, they are slow to respond. The weaponized mist spreads unnoticed, while I wait. Some of the largest and apparently strongest are the first to suffer—survivors of past holocausts, I theorize, and weakened, or with an acquired sensitivity. First, they quiver all over, and go rigid for a moment. As the lethal rain continues, nervous systems begin to relay strange messages. Then a shivering chaos vibrates up through ganglia to the insect brain and hence to the extremities. It's like watching plague and hunger strike a beseiged city. One after another, the inmates commence their dance, flipping themselves over and over, wildly out of control and running amok. The little ones stop, seeming to watch in amazement, as the fanatical possession spreads to them as well. Soon it shakes everyone, inducing waves of fear and a simultaneous scramble for the exits, lest their wills, too, fail and are paralyzed by this weakness, this whirling obsession. Panicked, and breathing deeply, they suck in their proper bane, as I move in for the kill.

Jewish Avenger

Spider Man of the garbage can—

his deadly dew

Most of them escape, but the kill rate is satisfactory. I know, because I've done this before, and every time my impact improves. I ease the pressure slowly to short, reinforcing squirts. I don't need to watch until every wriggle has ceased, either. I can imagine it. Beyond reach, cockroach corpses clog cockroach streets, cockroach subways and apartments. They crowd cockroach windows and doors, lying where they died in a final bid for cockroach freedom. But dried and blackened, in a few days they all will fall to dust, and disappear. Whither, I do not know.

I open the doors to the restaurant to air the place out, and in an hour, I remove the CLOSED sign from the window, and again invite in the world. Our little corner is safe once more.

today's special

chicken soup with lox

and a bagel

by Garry Eaton

Port Moody, British Columbia

Jeffrey Winke: Keeps Hammering the Dull

2009-06-24T07:00:00.001-04:00

He tries to kill the flies before most customers arrive. You can hear the thwack, thwack, thwack as he chases a slow-moving fat one that’s on a late autumn suicide mission. The stupid thing keeps hammering the dull, grimy windowpane hell-bent on achieving a deadly concussion before a thwack will splat the life out of it. The bartender clearly isn’t a Buddhist. The broken window pane will never get fixed, because it’s way too big a deal to dismantle the window frame in order to get a clear shot at the pane. The bartender chuckles at his cleverness when he thinks: What a pain this pane would be to fix.

good-ol’-boy bar—
I mess with them,
order a chardonnay

..
by Jeffrey Winke
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Bob Lucky: Bake Sale

2009-06-21T07:00:00.001-04:00

The campus is thick with mothers and nannies laden with cupcakes, chocolate chip cookies and cinnamon rolls. Across the quad a woman sees me sitting on a bench, with my hands beneath my legs to keep them warm. She slows her pace, stops, then turns and heads towards me. We make eye contact when she is about thirty feet away. I watch the look of recognition dissolve as she gets closer.

“Oh, it’s not you.”

“But it is,” I reply.
.

an awkward silence
leaves change color
and blow away
.

by Bob Lucky
Hangzhou, China

Announcement: Publication of Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose 1—Summer 2009

2009-06-17T01:25:00.006-04:00

MET Press is pleased to announce the publication of a new journal. The premiere issue of the biannual journal, Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose, edited by Jeffrey Woodward, has been published in print, in PDF ebook, and in an online digital edition. This Summer 2009 issue is 184 pages in a trade paperback. ISSN 1947-606X.

Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose, with this inaugural issue, establishes itself as the first and only periodical devoted exclusively to these two mixed prose-and-verse genres. Haibun and tanka prose belong to the ancient and venerable tradition of Japanese poetry and belles-lettres. Their practice has waned in modern Japan but, with the continuing popularity of their respective parent-forms, haiku and tanka, in the West, haibun and tanka prose are experiencing unprecedented growth and diverse experimentation from New York to London, from Berlin to Brisbane, and in small towns and open countryside around the globe. Haibun and tanka prose are busily revising the general literary map and, in doing so, quietly reforming haiku and tanka also. Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose, a biannual journal, faithfully represents the full range of styles and themes adopted by contemporary practitioners and intends to play a vanguard role in charting the rapid evolution of these genres.

Check out Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose at http://www.themetpress.com/modernhaibunandtankaprose/masthead.html

For more information, contact the editor, Jeffrey Woodward, at MHTP.EDITOR@GMAIL.COM

Review of Ken Jones' STONE LEEKS

2009-06-15T07:00:00.000-04:00

Stone Leeks: More Haiku Stories by Ken Jones. (Pilgrim Press, Troedrhiwsebon, Cwmrheidol, Aberystwyth, SY23 3 NB, Wales. 2009). 96 pp. ISBN 978-0-9539901-6-0. Price: 6 pounds 50

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Reviewed by Patricia Prime

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Stone Leeks is typical Ken Jones. All these haibun follow the same path which his writing has followed in a long and distinguished career. Often reading these haibun I paused to reflect on the way these poems seem older, richer, more resigned versions of the same sort of haibun all the way from those of Pilgrim Foxes (2001, a volume shared with Jim Norton and Sean O’Conner), Arrow of Stones (2002), Stallion’s Crag (2003) and The Parsley Bed (2006).

There may be a little disappointment that there is no late flight of greatness in his writing, as he is perhaps one of the best practioners of haibun, if elegance and observation are criteria enough. We aren’t confronted with anything of strangeness or genius, but with a wry and beautiful understanding of the British countryside, and indeed, of human life.

This is not to say there is no development, or improvement. The collection contains five sections of 28 haibun on the themes of nature, absurdities, war, love and the inevitable winding down of life. Each section of haibun is interspersed with 59 free standing haiku.

The first haibun “Goodman’s Wood” is a fine story about an older, wiser narrator looking back on the woods where once lead mining took place:

Two hundred years ago there was some lead mining here—a truly hellish, poisoning occupation.

Spoil heap stained red
split needles
of the crooked pine

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Now the writer is in the area felling old trees. Here Jones unselfconsciously lets his talent for description render the scene. Like his other penchant, that of sage commentary, this seems slightly incongruous, but it is so much part of his style that we come to accept it.

“Let Me Be” is a slice-of-life story where, upon entering primeval woodland, Jones encounters a woman:

And then, I see here. She is climbing the crag ahead up a steep deer track, agile and sure-footed. Fawn shirt and matching slacks, brown shoulder length hair, and—decidedly odd—not even a day sac. To catch her up I climb the bare rock over to the left—a granite boiler plate, sticking to my boots, clinging to my fingers.

The concluding paragraph gives a sympathetic description of the woman’s disfigured face as she lopes away across a field.

In the second section, “Theatre of the Absurd,” I enjoyed “Seat 16,” where the subject is given a brief, transformative insight that transcends the world of travel:

Nonchalantly I explore my own coach and the adjacent ones. Mine alone has four more seat numbers than any other, yet carries the same number of seats. Ah, the ticket collector! He just shrugs: L’actualite, monsieur, souvent c’est bizarre. At this, Le Monde Diplomatique is lowered just enough to reveal a goatee beard and an ironic gaze: Soyez stoique, mon brave! He grins.

It is not so much the substance of the story that matters as the way Jones tells it with humour, his occasional use of French words and phrases and the surprising denouement.

In the third section, “War,” Jones’ details are perfect and delicious. Jones writes often of his wartime experiences and in “’We Shall Never Surrender!’” he writes about the local war effort:

All the usual divisions in our local war effort are forgotten. For a start, there’s the Red Dragon which flies in front of the Prince of Wales (again is it Owain Glyndwr or “Mr Windsor”?) and the Union Glad which Parson King flies from his church tower. But not today.

.
Peaceful morning
both flags so limp
you can’t tell which

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Mind you, Caradoc ap Rhys, landlord of the Prince of Wales pub, has won one concession. All orders shall be shouted in Welsh, in order to confuse the Germans (and probably half the village).

His use of ordinary people and the vernacular is admirable. With perceptiveness and wisdom, he neatly captures a bygone era.

In “La Liberation,” he and a friend trudge the “ancient pilgrim route from Winchester cathedral to Mont Saint-Michel.” This story is maybe a response to those who see Jones as a “provincial”: someone who only describes or appreciates his own country of Wales:

Baguettes and camembert in the shade of tombstones. Angoville-au-Plein changed hands three times in three days. Inside its eleventh century church, bloodstained pews and bullet marks. Here Kenneth Moore and Robert Wright, US army medics, tended eighty American and German soldiers—and one French child.

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Army Surplus—
“Shell Wound Dressing”
5 euros

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All Jones’ characters are practically interchangeable: their lives are different but they have a wry, elegiac tone. They remark and draw out rather than criticize. The effect requires a suspension of disbelief but, in the end, you come to accept it as unchangeable, and look for nuances elsewhere.

For example, consider the final sentences of “Belle Époque,” “Untidy Loves” and “Song of the Saws” respectively (from the fourth section, “Love”):

*

And now all over Europe the lights are going out. As a foreign national I depart on the last train.
.

August 1914
the porcelain shepherdess
her smile

*

“Oh God, why is life so harsh for some?” I ask. “It’s to teach us to grind our teeth down to the stumps, that’s what it is, laddie”. Barefoot stubs out his Woodbine—hard.

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Old book cases
bowed shelves. A tumble
of reeling spines

*

What remains is a mound of sawdust swept in summer sunshine. She has wheeled the last load of firewood into the stable, to be stacked neatly in the stalls of farm horses.

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A long, ripe marriage
drumming logs into the barrow
our fire dance

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We cannot complain about writing this good. Jones wraps up his haibun with an authoritative voice, with a beautiful and complete sentence, followed by a haiku.

The final section, “The Stone Leeks,” is comprised of 10 haibun. One of my favourites is “All’s Right on the Night” about “the strange daytime of theatre,” with its evocations of props, costumes, scenery and the backstage labyrinth of stairs and passageways. A couple of haibun in this section bring the reader up-to-date with Jones’ reminiscences of surgery and the seaside town of Llandudno where the sick and elderly go to take the air and recuperate, as in this excerpt from “Costa Geriatrica”:

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Sun and sky
a bright and breezy
way to go

Here in the sixth century Saint Tudno built his rough stone oratory for ascetic prayer, and gave his name to Llandudno. It is now a genteel resort, where the Grand, the Imperial, the Hydro, the King George and many more stand carefully preserved in pastel stucco.

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“BOOTS” and “OSTLER”
bell pushes
which no longer work

However, the grim trio of sickness, old age and death are still muffled by deep pile carpets and the relentless keeping-up-of appearances

.
Expensive and well-cut
how they hang
on these poor wasted clothes horses

The final haibun in this wonderful collection is “The Project”—the author, preparing for his own wake, reminisces about projects he worked on throughout his life and comes to the conclusion—

I laugh at my own funeral oration, so solemnly intoned and recorded when a precocious forty year old. Poking charred diaries. A lifetime of stories told to myself, one as good as another. Knock, knock. Is there anyone there?

. Old Old summer house
settling out of true
to how it needs to be

Finally, the sending out of invitations to the Graceful Exit Party. From that celebratory wake I alone shall depart sober. And, on the back door, hammer the bottom line of a closed book:

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Winter twilight
cutting timber by the Rheidol
all there is to know

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This is a cunningly contrived, beautifully written and wonderfully readable collection. Not only does it say much about the poet and his roots, but page after page has the type of prose that can only be written by somebody who knows exactly what effects he means to create and exactly how to create them. A writer at the top of his form, in other words.

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by Patricia Prime
Auckland, New Zealand

Jeffrey Woodward: NEBRASKA

2009-06-12T07:00:00.000-04:00

a bare tree
and then, again,
the Great Plains

opening before you as if set into place checked and double-checked with a master carpenter’s level so nearly exact as to render literal that old saw about mountain and molehill frost over first light unwinding a never-ending scroll of sky a wind to whittle cloud after cloud away if not the stench of pig trough pig pen another village interrupting the prickly monotony of corn stubble another village with a water tower’s polished introduction and then again corn stubble a patchwork of brown of gray

remembering
its roots in the sky—
a bare tree

by Jeffrey Woodward

Detroit, Michigan

first published in Frogpond 31:2, Spring/Summer 2008

Bob Lucky: SHIRAZ

2009-06-09T07:00:00.000-04:00

I haven’t had a drink in five years, well, not more than a glass here and there, not since my brother died of a cocaine overdose, but I have to say, to say that this bottle, this Shiraz, this is no doubt, doubtlessly the best bottle of wine or whatever I’ve had in a long time.
.

two weeks of rain
the faces in the mold
on the café wall

by Bob Lucky
Hangzhou, China

Ruth Holzer: FULTON STREET

2009-06-06T07:00:00.000-04:00

I didn’t know anything; I thought if I cooked a hot meal every night, kept our two-room apartment clean and enlivened it with decorative touches—Japanese prints, Indian throw pillows here and there—that he would care for me as in the early days, or at least stay a little bit longer.
.

wisps of fog—
breaking up
the joint account

by Ruth Holzer
Herndon, Virginia

Diana Webb: LEPIDOTERISTS

2009-06-03T07:00:00.000-04:00

From two fiddles and an accordian, the strains of Mallow Fling as the first thistle seeds drift out towards the folly on the hill. In search of butterflies, we follow the leader along the path where flowers of the wild carrot foam shoulder high as if the sea has parted.

a Comma sighted—
the line of walkers
pauses

He mentions different stategies for survival as experts dart from bushes on one side to grasses on the other. Look here. Look there! Common Browns and Marbled Whites and Silver Washed Fritillaries. With tiny cameras, one crouched above a leaf, one halfway up a slope. 'Enough. No More.' We head back down towards the garden party past Rosebay Willow Herb and Mallow flowers.

dash of citrus—
the longevity
of brimstones

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by Diana Webb
London, England

Review of Diana Webb's TAKEAWAY

2009-05-31T07:00:00.003-04:00

Takeaway – a Collection of Haibun by Diana Webb (Hub Editions, Longholm, East Bank, Wingland, Sutton Bridge, Spalding, Lincolnshire, PE12 9YS, U.K. 2008), 20 x 13 cm. chapbook, ISBN: 978-1-903746-76-9. Available 5.50 pounds.

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Reviewed by Patricia Prime

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Takeaway is a nicely produced small book containing 40 haibun, divided into five sections. Many of the haibun, mostly one per page, consist of one paragraph of prose followed by a single haiku, although there are one or two exceptions. Takeaway is an extremely beautiful explanation of the memories, both cultural and personal, which haunt, yet comprise us. What is most striking is that the haibun seem to draw from the same wardrobe of topics. They show an intensely lived connection to the natural environment and to humanity and deal with personal experience: places (such as a glass tower, museums, cafes and the estuary); people met or remembered (grandmother, an aunt, her father, the pharmacist, friends and a lollipop lady); ruminations on paintings by Van Gogh, Millais, Degas, Monet,Turner and others, and poems that resonate with the sacred—the Pilgrim’s Way, Easter and a Covent Garden church.

The book’s first section “Reminiscence Work” is written from the poet’s point of view as she reminisces about her childhood. In the first haibun, “Ground,” Webb presents a conventional picture of a view from a “twenty first century glass tower”: “At the top of a twenty first century glass tower, views all around and a window as far back as I can see: this 1940’s ‘Children’s Paradise’.” In “not just teddy” Webb writes about what she would save if there was a fire:

If the flat caught fire and I could save only one thing, I would save this bear. He no longer wears the blue and mustard striped jersey my father knitted after the war. His mournful smile absorbs the years, picnics and parties in his honour. Pooled childhoods. Sadness settles on him like dust.

my son types it in,
new e-mail password—
name of the old bear

In the second section, “On Canvas,” Webb reverts to one of her favourite themes: poems about painters and their work, projecting her views in her usual quiet style, as we see in the following haibun:

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Claude Monet—Monochrome
(High tide at Etretat, 1868; The Magpie, 1869)

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Water lilies wait under the weeping willows. Years before . . .

He labours through taste and sting of salt on November gales, the roar and the splash, to anchor an instant.

beyond whisked waves
peak of one dark rock—
man holds his hat down

He sets up his easel in the middle of a white winterscape, becomes part of it. Icicles form in his beard as the moment freezes.

one for sorrow
perched on the gate—
shadows on snow

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As it turns out, the place where Webb really writes in her own voice is in the book’s third section, “Particulars of Place.” In narrative terms, in this section Webb reaffirms her allegiance to the beauty of the English countryside, as we see in the prose section of “A Space":

Vibrant with birdsong, a wooded backdrop. A large oak overhangs, as nettles and grasses partly curtain the small eighteenth century landscape bridge with its central ornamental shell, arched over weed aflit with damselflies . . .

In “Chamber of Commerce,” the fourth section, the haibun are full of precision, music and rhythm. Here is an excerpt from “Surfaces”:

Blue Café—a pigeon swept sky reflected in the glassy table top.

Home—maybe reading . . .

lifting down
the Zen poem book—
a cloud of dust

Webb’s main strength is her imagery. One of my favourite haibun is “Matinee Idol,” from section five, “Sacred Spaces”:

One by one he lights the candles, opens the book at the appropriate pages, starts to ring the bell. The Covent Garden church, famed for its memorials to people of the theatre, emptied now of tourists.

...................‘For I will consider my cat Jeoffrey’
.
at the chancel steps
SILENCE
on four white paws

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This is a successful and poignant image because the haiku reinforces the prose topic, the cat. Many other images in Webb’s haibun are clever, striking and communicative. The haiku are at least as well written as the prose: every word carries weight; every punctuation mark counts; language, meaning and form are interdependent.

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Several of the haibun in the final section, “Crossing Boundaries,” are longer in form. Webb can make a tight image-sequence like “Pinned” work, and is even more successful with a more diffuse haibun like “Time Wasting” which sets up a conversation between the poet as a child and a lay teacher at her convent school. Here and elsewhere in the collection, Webb shows herself simultaneously immersed in the landscape and rituals of English life—school, holidays, shopping, church—and engaged with a wider painterly sphere. Several haibun cite painter’s influences: Van Gogh, Degas, Turner, and Monet, to name a few. A brief haibun from this section is “A Holiday (Edward H Potthast)”:

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Most paintings of such views are one third sea and two thirds sky, but this one fills the canvas almost to the top with damp sand, shallows, waves . . .

.
sifting through
a small girl’s fingers
worlds

The haibun at the end of the collection “Connecting” transports us to the persona’s choice of buying beads instead of a book of poems, evoking a level of interest which makes us look back with new eyes on the haibun which make up the rest of the book. Here is an extract from the haibun:

As the small glass spheres slip one by one along the needle into the growing necklace, her reflections drift from by gone generations through parting with a lover to embryos in formation. A tranquility, each moment hovers.

.
cobweb strung with mist
across stems of lavender—
span of light years
.

Webb gives us poetry which invites us to take our time, return and reread to reflect on its imagery and allusions. Webb is a thoughtful, sensitive and lucid writer; this collection has the depth, breadth and vigour to make us take her seriously. Her haibun are full of warmth, humility and poise. This is a collection to enjoy in moments of solitude and maintains the high standard we have come to expect from the poet.

by Patricia Prime

Auckland, New Zealand

Marleen Wenneker-Hulst: SUNNYSIDE UP

2009-05-28T07:00:00.001-04:00

I am on the ferry to Schiermonnikoog on this warm and bright Sunday morning. Despite the early hour two girls, students I gather, are cheering the crowd on board. Wearing extravagant hats they go jigging and singing along the lower deck. However eyebrows are raised at first, most people appear to enjoy it all the same.

summer wind—
the captain winks
as waves splatter

Later that day, I stop in the village for an ice cream. Across the street, the two girls from the ferry are baking eggs on a tiny gas cooker. “EGG SANDWICH SUNNYSIDE UP—ONLY 1 EURO”, their handwritten sign reads. It is obvious that they are amusing themselves, even though their clientele seems somewhat disappointing. This cannot have anything to do with lack of enthusiasm; their merchandise is being recommended as irresistibly tasty to anyone they see.

Watching those girls doing business in this cheerful manner is catching. It seems though that putting a smile on people’s faces is more rewarding to them than making money. Today anyway.

shovels and buckets
in the baggage rack
beach shuttlebus

by Marleen Wenneker-Hulst
Musselkanaal, the Netherlands

Catherine Mair & Patricia Prime: DESERT CAMP

2009-05-25T07:00:00.000-04:00

When my uncle sailed on the Rangitata with the first echelon for Egypt, he left his farm in my parents' care. Their first task was to build a cottage for sharemilkers. Wick and Betty were a fine Maori couple with four children of similar age to us. We used to love going down to the tiny cottage to watch Betty groom her girls' hair. How we admired those bouncy, black ringlets.

in the porch
a milk billy
hung from a nail

The young man wrote home about his experiences of the wartime camp in the Egyptian desert. He described the dirt tracks beside which huts were erected, wells dug, and the transient army camp which grew into a city like no other. He told us the Maadi camp sported cinemas, bars, canteens, chapels, libraries, sports fields, a swimming pool - even an ice cream and meat pie factory.

in his photo
soldiers in 'lemon squeezers'
beside the Sphinx

He wrote in a postcard, "The ramshackle cinema, named Thomas Shafto, near the entrance to the camp, is the first building we see on our return to Maadi from the Western Desert."

veteran's parade . . .
one less companion
to greet

*lemon squeezer—nickname given to the Kiwi soldier's pointed hat.

by Catherine Mair and Patricia Prime
Katikati, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand
and Auckland, New Zealand

Richard Straw: PLATO’S CAVE

2009-05-22T07:00:00.000-04:00

I meet by chance on the street someone who resembles one of my dead grandpas and who could be the twin brother of Carl Sandburg, who died even longer ago. We walk into his basement apartment, the entrance a trap door. It's either that or a farmhouse cellar—hard to tell in the dream. He tells me his problem—what to do with his many manuscripts, books, papers. I suggest hiring an assistant, someone who won't know or care that he's working for a well-known writer. We talk about Huckleberry Finn, why it's reread, despite its moral dilemmas, to re-create lost innocence.

As I glance at his close-cropped hair, crow's feet, tired but still-bright eyes, the scene shifts to midwinter in Ohio, snow a foot deep, and me standing in the kitchen of my parents' house, my last boyhood home in their small town. Beyond the dinette curtains, five horses, their nostrils steaming, wait on the moonlit driveway, which is cleared of snow. I cry out for dad to see. When I wake, a headache I've had for days is gone.

standing still
the longest time
roller coaster

by Richard Straw
Cary, North Carolina
first published in Lynx V23, N1 (February 2008)

Review of Richard Straw's THE LONGEST TIME

2009-05-19T07:00:00.005-04:00

The Longest Time: Haibun by Richard Straw (privately printed: 107 Mont de Sion Drive, Cary, NC 27513, USA. 2009). 21 x 14 cm chapbook, obtainable from the author. $5 US; $8 US abroad (added S&H). Cover photographs are by Marissa Rachel Straw. Other images are from family albums and postcards.

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Reviewed by Patricia Prime

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Richard Straw’s collection of haibun, The Longest Time, is, in its own way, about explorations and discoveries of the self which are as much cerebral and metaphysical as geographical and physical. Mostly, the paths readers are taken along by Straw have origins that are intriguing and transits that are stimulating. Each haibun describes a memory—from childhood growing up in a “walk-up apartment above a soda shop” to the poet making resolutions to himself in the final haibun, “Whether Together or Apart,” before going to sleep:

What was it I told myself last night before going to sleep? Just before the headlights dimmed against the wall, after the last neighbor pulled into the parking lot outside my window, I’d promised myself something that I can’t remember now, even though with three cups of coffee drunk and a fourth one brewing on the hotplate. I haven’t been able to remember anything lately unless I wrote it down.

Straw’s opening line to the succinct haibun “First Impressions” exemplifies the ethos behind this collection. Memory, confrontation, and deconstruction: this is a book laden with possibilities and the permutations and permeations that result from the memories of a lifetime. So often these haibun arise out of an engagement with the personal and the landscape, real but also charged with poetic diction. Take the following prose excerpt from “A Helping Hand”:

And I peer past my ear into the black air register from which, as if quaking in my bedroom on the other side, Fay Wray screams and screams and screams as she’s carried into the jungle by King Kong.

Here the reader’s taken through a landscape that’s at once familiar and yet subjective, a combination that ensures that our view of the recognizable and intimate can become at once estranged and unfamiliar. The entire transformation hinges upon memory—upon whether what is remembered is truthful or a fabrication with a kernel of truth which transforms it.

It’s a battle of words versus memory that’s present in all the haibun. “Sunday Drive” (illustrated by a photo of the poet’s parents) is an evocation of a visit to a relative’s farm:

Our parents take my sister and me to a relative’s farm near Sunbury. The barnyard’s full of running headless chickens and a crazed dog. The farmer uses a tree stump as a chopping block. Much later his son dies James Dean style on graduation night.

empty space
where flower pots were
a wasp returns

“Katallagete,” apart from being indicative of Straw’s delight in playing with recall, assumption, locale and history, personal and collective, also epitomizes an authorial interest in friendship and the poetical exploration of youthful experiences:

Bright spots are rare in this small town, even on Christmas Eve. Earlier tonight, after watching a campy movie in a cold theater, I joined a couple of older friends, Junior and Jesse, to go caroling. Rather than ask them to drop me off at home later, I agreed to chug-a-lug beers at their apartment above Jack’s TV shop. Then, on Junior’s dare, we almost got shot at by Foxy on Senate Street because of something Jesse said to one of Foxy’s girls. We got separated at The Attic after I was pushed down the wide wooden stairs for getting up on the bar with a go-go-dancer.

“Festival of Lights” is a lovely depiction of nature observed on a journey home from work in wintertime:

I drive home from work. Bright colors frame windows and doors; electric candles rest on windowsills. Pine branches drape entry ways, even garage doors. Pulsing lights reveal the limbs of leafless saplings. Wooden Santas, nutcracker soldiers, and white deer pose on snowless lawns.

at home
blue menorah candles
smolder

Several haibun focus on Straw’s father. “Stronger Grip” reflects on his father’s illness in a heartbreaking contemplation. Before the writer hurries off to catch a plane, he plays a childhood game with his father who is in a private hospital room:

I tell him that I have to hurry back to the airport for a midday flight. Then I reach for his hand, and we play an old game: “Who has the stronger grip?” This time, I let him win. I try to smile as I say, “Bye, take care.”

After saying goodbye and talking to a nurse, the poet tells us his reaction:

I rush into a bathroom and begin sobbing. I continue to cry in the empty elevator, then in the rental car all the way to the airport, quieting finally on the packed plane.

Easter snapshot

a boy and his dad

cast one shadow

“Handed On,” is a fraught personal reaction to the father’s death and funeral. It is a personification of all the conflicts—belief-versus-practice, memory-versus-history, public-versus-private space—that engage Straw’s work:

Before the funeral service began, my cousins gave me a silver frame, “In Loving Memory of My Father . . .,” with a photo of dad and me shaking hands and smiling on one of our birthdays 20 years before. A pianist played favorite hymns, the new minister from dad and mom’s church did the eulogy, and solemn men from dad’s lodge performed from memory a ceremony in his honor. Asked to say a few words, I merely recited with a bowed head Psalm 23 from an open Bible:

rain on a road
before his coffin is closed
touching dad’s hand

In the lengthy haibun “Sketching from Life,” Straw rightly notes his father’s dislikes and his lifelong job as a welder, and his discovery of a sketch he found on the table a week before his father died:

Dad did one other sketch that I found on his kitchen dinette table the week before he died. He drew it with a ballpoint pen in blue ink on a brown envelope containing a coffee-table book I’d mailed him for what turned out to be his final birthday the year before.

The poignancy of this haibun, with its meticulous attention to detail and its reference to a birthday present that will never be looked at, is extremely touching.

With equally heartfelt empathy, in “Perennials,” Straw writes about his mother:”After 50 years with multiple sclerosis, every nerve she has is scarred. And since dad’s death, premature senility has taken her mind.” He completes the haibun with this poignant memory of his mother:
.

During her first winter there, mom told me she’d been studying “a large menacing goldfish” in the front lobby’s aquarium. She said that most of the other fish in the tank had disappeared, except for one or two hiding in corners. She whispered, “I’ve always been a small fish watching and staying out of the way of larger fish.”

long winter
in an untended flowerbed
tulip bulbs

For Straw the personal so often acts as a medium transporting haibun and reader to another terrain—historical, psychological, religious and physical. As well as seriousness, there’s a great deal of playfulness to be had here too. Take, for instance, the powerful “Fiddling On,” a haibun scanning symbolic and real events. In this excerpt, Straw writes about a photo he shows to his children:

The kids study it, but draw blanks. So, I tell them that years ago my mom photographed my dad, his brother, and me in an Ohio apple orchard. Dad’s and my uncle’s sacks are chock full and sit lopsided in tall grass. The apples lasted until Thanksgiving and went into pies served hot with vanilla ice cream. Our kids never met my uncle, though, and they saw my dad just once or twice. They barely recognize me with my moustache and long hair.

This is typical of Straw’s trick throughout The Longest Time: to guide the reader along trajectories that derive intensity from memory and locale. Quite simply, the book moves us. Through its charting of historical and emotional spectrums, we’re untroubled in attaining the collection’s higher philosophy.

by Patricia Prime

Auckland, New Zealand

Charles Hansmann: EN POINTE

2009-05-16T07:00:00.000-04:00

Someone’s daughter loves to dance. Any unheard music seems to do, and any partner. The table’s shimmed leg attends her lifted heel. She gains a peek beyond the windowsill.

ballet slippers
pigeon-toed
beside the bed
.
.

by Charles Hansmann
Sea Cliff, New York
first published in Frogpond 31: 1 (Winter 2008)

Stanley Pelter: CITY OF GIFTS

2009-05-13T07:00:00.003-04:00

not quite ready to fly
a pale dove flitters
river curve

Fancy going to Florence on Wednesday?
Where?
Florence
Where’s that?
Italy
How come?
Someone’s cancelled. I’ll square it with school.
Thanks....................................................but no thanks.
Why not?.....................................It’s only for a couple of days.
I don’t know anybody. They’re learning Italian. I’m younger than them. I’ve got lots on. .............I don’t want to.
Most are young.........very friendly.........and I’ll be with you.
She is 12........................................Square it with School.

It’s your bat mitzva
What?..............................................Can I sit by the window?
Yes
They have been friendly. She is relaxed. Flight will arrive early morning. Seems to sleep; head to one side, eyes closed. Rapid first growth of morning. Pre-sun glow spreads across a clear blue light of Florentine sky. Opens her eyes. Descent follows bridged line of river Arno. Slowly we lower. Early sun shapes all colours and hues. Luminous space of a City of Gifts is compressed. Not blinking, she looks down on an unfamiliar roofscape. I know that look.

cage glides to earth
which we watch grow large
she silent............wide eyed

Why didn’t you tell me?
There is more

Let’s walk. Go to the Accademia. Visit David
We look up at this translated marble, lit by a midday sun. A dome flows light. A frozen moment of silence dominates space a juvenile giant occupies. At first she doesn’t speak. Then . . .
Who made it? David was the small one, not the giant.
Michelangelo. He does reverse things a bit. Usual image is after their battle. Michelangelo describes that moment when a childman makes a momentous decision, enters an arena of power. One act will change his life forever. See that huge veined hand, its position, sling lifted, ready to kill. Michelangelo was a little man with a broken nose. David was his gigantic, one-man rebellion against convention, against accepted tradition. Single-handedly, this huge Italian created a spatial, a temporal shift that had a profound effect on river flows of art.
I had said too much. Said it all wrong. She says nothing. Is still looking up at this boy who would be King. After two hard years of carving, here he stands, a technical, an aesthetic marvel. Unsurpassed. Maybe those ‘Slaves’ emerging from rocks. Perhaps his ‘Pietà’. We walk away. Walk towards the Ponte Vecchio with its sparkling gold, shining silver shops, past the Uffizi, the Piazza del Duomo, to the Brancacci Chapel. Stand silently before Masaccio’s ‘The Expulsion of Adam and Eve’ and, in disbelief, ‘St Peter healing the Sick with his Shadow’. Walk. Walk in silence. Walk until the sun tires.

She puts her arm through mine like a grown up woman.

river view
see clouds in ways
that change everything
.

by Stanley Pelter
Claypole, Lincolnshire, England

Richard Straw: FIDDLING ON

2009-05-10T07:00:00.000-04:00

In late October, the last of summer's crickets can still be heard amid the leaves and twigs near my office here in North Carolina. They're not like the ones I grew up with in Ohio that are driven underground a bit earlier by colder weather.

Once I get home, I flip through several family albums, looking for one photo in particular. I almost don't hear my wife calling me downstairs for supper. At the table, I pass around the photo, saying, "See anyone you know?"

The kids study it, but draw blanks. So, I tell them that years ago my mom photographed my dad, his brother, and me in an Ohio apple orchard. Dad's and my uncle's sacks are chock full and sit lopsided in tall grass. The apples lasted until Thanksgiving and went into pies served hot with vanilla ice cream. Our kids never met my uncle, though, and they saw my dad just once or twice. They barely recognize me with my moustache and long hair.

I don't tell them of the evening when my uncle, surrounded by his family, died painfully at home of lung cancer. I also don't tell them of the night my dad called me after he learned he had terminal cancer in early autumn as the leaves were turning red and gold. They're beginning to realize on their own why my mom doesn't say much when we phone her on Sundays at the nursing center, that her premature senility doesn't mean she loves them any less.

"Someday," I do say, "we'll go apple picking. Wouldn't that be fun?"

apple pickers gone
down among the windfall
a muted cricket

by Richard Straw
Cary, North Carolina
haibun first published in Contemporary Haibun Online V3, N2 (June 2007)
haiku first published in Acorn 17 (Fall 2006)

Catherine Mair & Patricia Prime: FOREBEARS

2009-05-07T07:00:00.001-04:00

I swish back the curtains. There's a drowned cabbage-tree silhouetted against the sea-grey sky. Rain forms a mini-waterfall from each sword-like leaf. At the supermarket I notice sunflowers propped in a bucket. Sunflowers! for a rainy day. Sunflowers to brighten Mum's room at the resthome.

an afternoon
for videos—which?
reading glasses at home

The chapbook "Molly's Room" lies on the table. The photo collages remind Duncan of his great-grandparents who arrived in New Zealand in 1870 to set up shop in Remuera (now one of Auckland 's high-end shopping centres). He recalls how an uncle 'married' a Maori girl and fathered five children before his lawful wife arrived from Britain and he fathered another seven with her. The Maori 'wife' returned with her children to her whanau, but one daughter remained with her father. Missionaries taught her to play the piano and eventually she became a concert pianist.

seaman—
his scarred hand
fingers the pages

Skeletons in cupboards. The ambiguity of surnames. How, why—our father, your father?

family wedding
duskier skins
on one side of the church

by Catherine Mair and Patricia Prime
Katikati, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand
and Auckland, New Zealand
.

*whanau—family

Charles Hansmann: SLANT

2009-05-04T07:00:00.001-04:00

Some times of day don’t show themselves direct—they’re just reflected on the surface, skittish moments slinking down to drink, rippling indistinct the instant that we see them. Then turn around. Some times of day only follow on their memory, haven’t happened till they’re past, a set sun lighting up the hill behind, reappearing as we climb.

up all night
to see what cats see
alley moon

.

by Charles Hansmann
Sea Cliff, New York
first published in Frogpond 31:2 (Spring/Summer 2008)

Dru Philippou: WIND POWER

2009-05-01T07:00:00.001-04:00

On the Beaufort Scale of 2, a light breeze forms wavelets, rustles palms. On the scale of 4, a moderate breeze wipes footprints from the sand, blows a sailboat out to sea—

And on 8, a gale of 40 knots, I paddle my surfboard out in the ocean; make it to the lineup, sit-up, and wait for the sets. A swell approaches. Turning the nose of my board shoreward, I start to paddle then stand. I ride towards those palm branches snapping, and breakers crashing against rock; my mother’s voice gone.

a deep-sea
anglerfish slams
its mouth shut—
for a limpet,
an unknown universe.
.

by Dru Philippou
Taos, New Mexico
first published in Modern English Tanka, V3 N2 (Winter 2008)

Richard Straw: DESERT PLACES

2009-04-28T07:00:00.000-04:00

In omnibus requiem quaesivi et nusquam inveni nisi in een Hoecken met een Böcken.

—Thomas à Kempis

"Everywhere I have sought rest and found it nowhere, save in little nooks with little books." His monastery cell and lancet window reappear now on a second-hand bookstore's shelf, where I find him again remaindered, but translated afresh.

I trust and collect such personal jottings, especially those published anonymously or collected posthumously by friends. Steady correspondents; meditative diarists and fiction writers; reclusive poets, aphorists, and parable tellers; and especially this speaker of homilies to common brethren—all capture the small moments. The words are not short-sighted, despite their authors' often being short-winded. Without them, there's no antidote to the daily bluster.

At home, going at a labyrinth walk's pace, I begin this updated version of the Imitation, penciling in light marginal notes and comparisons with its prior translations. My eyes close to visualize the words. My wristwatch ticks as I breathe air from the past.

mountaintop
I reach out to feel
clouds
.

by Richard Straw
Cary, North Carolina
first published in Contemporary Haibun Online V3, N4 (December 2007)
.

The Thomas à Kempis quotation is from an article by Vincent Scully that appeared in The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912, Volume XIV; see http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14661a.htm).

Tish Davis: CHAMPAGNE MUSIC

2009-04-25T07:00:00.000-04:00

I slip the Lawrence Welk DVD into the player and whisper, “Mom, our first sleep over.”

Black and whites change with the notes on his accordion, shadows crossing her toes exposed at the bottom of the bed. Now finished, the nurse returns the blanket charting the formalities under the watchful eye of the Franciscan cross hanging on the wall. An aide helps me move the recliner closer. A pajama party—I remembered to bring my own pillow.

light and bubbly
a respirator breathes
for both of us

by Tish Davis
Dublin, Ohio
first published in Ink, Sweat and Tears (March 5, 2008)

Announcement & Update: The Biennial British Haiku Society Haibun Anthology 2009

2009-04-24T07:00:00.000-04:00

The British Haiku Society has extended the closing date for this international award to 1 October 2009 because the editors felt that there were insufficient entries of a strong enough quality.

You now have a further opportunity to send in your best haibun that illustrate an awareness of the relationship between the prose and haiku. The editors recommend that you think about the points below.

*Can the haiku stand alone and relate to the prose yet without repeating the same idea?
*Is there an identifiable theme that still leaves room for the reader to participate and find meaning?
*Is the language precise and fresh?

Conditions of entry:
*Open to all, except BHS committee members and any others involved with the administration of the anthology.
*Submissions must be written in English and be between 100 and 2000 words long, including haiku.
*Work must be unpublished and not under consideration for publication elsewhere.
*Each haibun should be given a title.

Entries will not be returned, so please retain copies of your submission. Copyright reverts to the author after publication in the anthology. In the event of there still being insufficient quantity and/or quality of submissions, those that are received will be carried forward for consideration for the 2011 anthology.

Submission details:
*Three copies of each haibun, with each copy starting on a separate A4 sheet.
*One copy should show your name, address, telephone number and email address (if applicable).
*The other two copies should contain no identification.

.
Entries on disk (floppy or CD, in Word format) will be happily accepted.
If you require receipt of your entry, please either request an email acknowledgement or send an SAE , or, for those overseas, an IRC stamped by the originating office.

Entry fee: £6.00 (cheques to ‘British Haiku Society’), or US$ 12 (in dollar bills), plus £3/6$ for each additional haibun.

Closing date: In hand by 1 October 2009.

Address for entries: Andrew Shimield, Haibun Anthology, 18 Deepwell Close, Isleworth, Middlesex , TW7 5EN , UK .

Selection and appraisal: The process will be undertaken by Jo Pacsoo and Lynne Rees. They will select the haibun for publication in the anthology, and will provide an appraisal of each haibun selected. It is anticipated that the anthology, whose title will be drawn from the selected haibun, will be published in spring 2010.

Copyright reverts to the author on publication, but entry to the 2009 anthology signifies agreement to your work being published digitally by the Society or copied for archival purposes (for example, by the British Library or Poetry Society).

All entrants will receive one copy of the anthology.

Barbara Strang: THE OMAUI ROAD

2009-04-22T07:00:00.000-04:00

The grownups are behind a newspaper. Something is being decided. At 10.30 our family crams into the Morris 8, Mum, Dad and baby in the front, and three of us packed in the back with belongings. We start along the windswept road to Bluff, but soon turn down a rutted track. Before us lies a sea of speckled mud.

The road to Omaui is not a road at all—it lies across this inlet called the Mokemoke, usually full of water. But where has it all gone? It could come rushing back . . . in one huge wave, engulfing the Morris 8, and us. We whizz over the smooth surface, probably crushing thousands of crabs. Ever closer to mysterious Omaui Hill with the three weird bumps on top.

Some day they will build a proper road to Omaui, which will skirt the Mokemoke and thrust through the patch of bush. We will drive there on Sunday afternoons.

almost hidden
amongst flax bushes—
the crib!

Note: “Flax”—the native harakeke, whose sword-like leaves can grow over six feet. “Crib”—Southern New Zealand dialect meaning holiday cottage

by Barbara Strang
Christchurch, New Zealand
first published in Kokako 6, 2007

Bob Lucky: DR. LIVINGSTON, YOU PRESUME

2009-04-19T07:00:00.000-04:00

I went to see my Chinese doctor this morning and wanted to say “Dr. Livingston, I presume,” but I bit my tongue, so to speak, and didn’t say anything but “Good morning” because, well, first of all, that’s probably the joke he is most sick of since that is his name, though he’s a physician and should be able to heal himself, and second, though it’s not related, is that he’s not Chinese but American, he just practices Chinese medicine, and that’s quite an accomplishment because if I’m not mistaken, and I have been before, he is the only non-Chinese doctor in China allowed or registered or certified or whatever it is they do here to practice Chinese medicine.

chilly morning
the blind erhu player
warms up

I am wishing my wife were here because she knows everything that is wrong with me, like the sneezing I always forget to mention, as Dr. Livingston and I gossip a bit about mutual acquaintances and he gets down to business taking my pulse and checking out my tongue and asking questions about my digestion and appetite and cough and have I been following his dietary recommendations, and I tell him that China makes me sick, and he laughs because we both know the air is horrible and we might as well take up a three-pack a day habit, and I’ve been coughing for two years, which he already knows, but my appetite is good and every time I eat fried food I think of what he’s told me, and then I remember a recent foot massage I had and tell him about how the masseuse looked at my big toe on my left foot and said I wasn’t sleeping well, and he just gives me this funny smile and says, “They always say that or something about your digestion.”

overcast skies
artificial sunflowers
turned to the window

Tapping his fingers lightly on the table and furrowing his brow, he gets very serious as he writes out a prescription for a Chinese herbal tea to help correct my damp heat stagnation, which he diagnosed partly by pushing all around my abdomen until he found out where it hurt, and to be honest I have no idea what damp heat stagnation is but I trust this man, for he is my doctor after all, and he’s kind, and most amazingly to me, he can write and speak Chinese like a native, and yes, as I said, I’m amazed but also jealous because Chinese has proven to be a completely foreign language to me, maybe because my brain is too filled with bits and pieces of other languages, of Hindi and Spanish mostly, but oddly what comes out of my mouth most often and inadvertently since living in China is Japanese, which I suppose the Chinese wouldn’t like if they knew what I was saying, though I’m not really saying much.

year of the rat
erasing the crossword
year of the cow

When it is time to go, I really don’t want to go because I know the next stop is the Chinese herb shop where I will have to push old ladies and stooped men out the way just to get a free cup of tea to get the courage to stand in line to pay before I go to the counter and join the scrum to get my herbs bundled up into little packages, and then I’ll have to walk around for an hour or two or hang out in a café while they put it all together, which isn’t so bad in Hangzhou if the air is okay that day, and later I’ll push my way back to the front of the counter and take my herbs home and make tea, at least that’s what they call it, but it is really the most god-awful concoction you can imagine, no matter what combination of herbs you get or even if you throw in a bit of cardamom toward the end of the first boiling, and this brew takes two boilings to release all the terrible smelling elixirs that will rejuvenate you, but in the meantime, at least for the next two weeks, you feel like the wicked witch of the west hovering over her cauldron, and you may look just as green, and you can’t invite anyone over to your apartment during that time because the place smells so bad, as if the family pet has died and been left in a corner because no one has the heart to take it outside and say goodbye.

winter thaw
the sweet potato vendor
pokes his last tuber

by Bob Lucky
Hangzhou, China

Marleen Wenneker-Hulst: PHOTO

2009-04-16T07:00:00.001-04:00

Sorting out an old box I come across my kindergarten class photo. I find myself on the front row, smiling, wearing the red and yellow dress I remember so well. Looking at the picture more closely I recognize the dark haired girl sitting next to me as Janine, now spouse of my colleague Jacob.

I take the photograph with me to the office the next morning, curious to see his reaction. But he starts laughing and waves the picture away, clearly refusing to face the image of the little girl who so many years later became his wife.

.
Bringing up your childhood like that means you are getting old, he says later.

thick snow
her steps
in his

by Marleen Wenneker-Hulst
Musselkanaal, the Netherlands

Ralph Murre: MARCH 19TH, BAILEYS HARBOR

2009-04-13T07:00:00.000-04:00

The sound is a blackbird, forever clearing its throat, like the morning-after chanteuse of a smoke filled club. A barking crow. A crowing dog. A cardinal calling for love as if a red shirt isn't enough. There's a rattle of pick-up trucks bound toward morning coffee, the discussion of March Madness and no work, yet the light has an angle of promise. A trickle of snowmelt and an old woman scrub at little corners of big problems, and the town yawns, if a town can yawn, into grudging wakefulness. The ice is mostly gone from the lake.
.

a blackbird
in all its darkness
a bright wing
.

by Ralph Murre
Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin

Ruth Franke: TEN BARS OF CHOCOLATE

2009-04-10T07:00:00.000-04:00

At the department store the girl at the cash desk runs her eye over the elderly gentleman who is pushing towards her ten bars of chocolate, top quality brand. Angular face, silvery hair, slight stoop, refined in a low key sort of way. Surrounding him, though, an atmosphere of trepidation and a barrier of silence.

Images flood the mind: an art exhibition with water colours of flowers by a young lady. The amateur artist herself ― elegant, sporty appearance, has had some success in the tennis world. The husband at her side older by some tens of years, grey-haired, clear-cut features. Then a winter scene: black ice, the man losing control of his Mercedes. He escaping injury, the young woman, no seatbelt on, paralyzed from the waist down. She doesn’t go out in public any more.

ravishing flowers
behind glass
no trace of scent

Years later the gentleman stands at the cash desk in the department store again ― with ten bars of chocolate, top quality brand. As ever carefully dressed, the stoop more pronounced, thinner now the silvery hair. A barrier of silence around him, but without trepidation.

He must be over eighty now and his wife somewhere around fifty . . .

on a park bench
withered pine needles
still in pairs

translation from German by David Cobb

by Ruth Franke

Emmendingen, Baden-Württemberg. Germany
first published in Blithe Spirit 18/4 (2008)

Zehn Tafeln Schokolade

Die Kassiererin im Kaufhaus mustert den älteren Herrn, der ihr zehn Tafeln Schokolade, edelste Sorte, hinschiebt. Scharf geschnittenes Gesicht, weißes Haar, leicht gebeugt, diskrete Eleganz. Um ihn herum ein jähes Erschrecken und eine Mauer des Schweigens.

Bilder steigen auf: eine Kunstausstellung, darunter Blumen-Aquarelle einer jungen Frau. Die Hobby-Malerin selbst – elegante, sportliche Erscheinung, erfolgreiche Tennisspielerin. Daneben ihr Mann - Jahrzehnte älter, graues Haar, markantes Gesicht. Dann der Winter, Glatteis, der Mann verliert die Kontrolle über den Mercedes. Er bleibt unverletzt, die junge Frau, nicht angeschnallt, ist querschnittsgelähmt. Sie zeigt sich nicht mehr in der Öffentlichkeit.

bezaubernde Blumen
hinter Glas
ganz ohne Duft

Jahre später steht der ältere Herr wieder an der Kasse des Kaufhauses mit zehn Tafeln Schokolade, edelste Sorte. Immer noch sorgfältig gekleidet, noch gebeugter, das weiße Haar schütter. Um ihn herum eine Mauer des Schweigens, doch kein Erschrecken.

Er müsste jetzt über achtzig sein und seine Frau um die fünfzig …

auf einer Parkbank
verdorrte Kiefernnadeln
paarweise

Zuerst veröffentlicht in Sommergras 12/2008.

Tish Davis: PAPIERS COUPES

2009-04-07T07:00:00.000-04:00

I find the amputee's room. The old woman is busy gluing an orange ring of florets onto the center of a giant sunflower cut from paper. Pinned to the white wall next to her bed, larger than life cutouts of tulips and daisies—reds and yellows flourishing alongside white chrysanthemums.

lingering

in the meadow

lavender

“Do you know the old proverb,” I ask, “when you can put your foot on seven daisies summer has come?”

Without looking up, she passes me a roll of tape, asks if I would please hang the sunflower on her door. Scissors in hand, she is already cutting another.

collage . . .

faces of the sun

facing east

by Tish Davis

Dublin, Ohio

Jeffrey Winke: ELECTRIC-GREEN CHOKERS

2009-04-04T07:00:00.000-04:00

The punch-metal gray-steel guard station looks formidable at the entrance to the intermodal station. It is cold, institutional. Two guards wearing reflective blue jumpsuits have a commanding view through the bullet-proof plate glass. A pleasant-looking couple tentatively approaches the station. They carry small, scuffed leather suitcases. Their electric-green chokers glow—alerting the guards of their threat status. Green indicates mild, yellow medium, and red’s a severe threat. The man speaks softly through the long, slender voice cone, “We wish passage to GADANK.” He wonders if he has been heard. He has. With a menacing leer, Guard A slowly appraises them, focusing his beady eyes on the young woman before sending a mild shock to her choker. “And what will YOU do to earn passage?” he asks the startled woman.

darkening office—
because he can, he tells her
to work overtime

by Jeffrey Winke
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Ruth Franke: A DOG’S LIFE

2009-04-01T07:00:00.002-04:00

His regular pitch is on the forecourt of a supermarket; by his side an Alsatian, into whose muzzle passers-by often pop some titbit. Quite a few coins drop into his cap, quickly to be converted into liquid nourishment.

faithful companion
the last drips of beer
from the drop-out's flask

Some time ago he must have come into some money. The second dog, a dark brown puppy, had a comfortable trailer to sit in, and that just as spanking new as the bicycle pulling it. Clothes no longer in shreds, hair cropped short. Sometimes we even saw a mobile clapped to his ear. And then he vanished for months on end.

Now he has turned up again at his old haunt, completely changed: no bike, thin as a rake, gone to seed, and looking years older. Can hardly keep control of the exuberant dog. And winter's coming . . .

foliage aglow
one week of storms
and ready for sweeping

translated from German by David Cobb

by Ruth Franke

Emmendingen, Baden-Württemberg. Germany
first published in Blithe Spirit 17/1 (2007)

Hundeleben

Sein Stammplatz ist auf dem Gelände eines Supermarktes, neben ihm der treue Schäferhund, dem die Passanten oft einen Leckerbissen zustecken. Manche Münze fällt in seine Mütze und wird bald wieder in flüssige Nahrung umgesetzt.

kein Hundeleben
der letzte Schluck des Penners
für den Gefährten

Vor einiger Zeit muss er wohl zu Geld gekommen sein. Der zweite Hund, ein dunkelbrauner Welpe, bekam als Sitzplatz einen komfortablen Anhänger, ebenso neu wie das dazugehörige Fahrrad. Auch seine Kleidung nun nicht mehr abgerissen, die Haare kurz geschoren. Manchmal sahen wir sogar ein Handy an seinem Ohr. Dann war er monatelang verschwunden.

Völlig verändert taucht er jetzt wieder am alten Platz auf: ohne Fahrrad, abgemagert und verwahrlost, um Jahre gealtert. Kaum kann er den lebhaften Hund bändigen. Und der Winter steht bevor . . .

leuchtendes Herbstlaub
nach einer Woche im Sturm
reif für den Besen

Zuerst veröffentlicht in Sommergras No.3/2007

Marleen Wenneker-Hulst: ELEVEN P.M.

2009-03-29T07:00:00.000-04:00

The phone rings. Would I like to help him move out next Saturday evening at eleven p.m.? A bit overwhelmed by his question, I do not answer straight away but I recover quickly. Yes, of course I will be there. He sounds exhausted and his explanation is an emotional summary of facts. They broke up and he left. End of story.

I had known about the increasing conflicts in their relationship for some time, but I had certainly not expected this. He is determined to leave quickly and quietly and does not want nosy neighbors around, hence the time. I wonder if this would not cause the opposite effect, but I say nothing.

home alone—
the subtle scent of her perfume
in the bedroom

by Marleen Wenneker-Hulst
Musselkanaal, the Netherlands

Bob Lucky: PROUST NEVER ATE BUTTERMILK PIE

2009-03-26T07:00:00.002-04:00

.family reunion
pies lined up on the counter
to cool

I’ve spent half my life trying to explain buttermilk pie to those who haven’t had the pleasure. Once, living in Japan, I decided I would have to bake a pie to make my case for the superiority of buttermilk over all other pies. I served it to guests, Australians and Japanese, on Thanksgiving Day. It was almost too sweet to eat. The Japanese politely took a bite, hid their mouths behind their hands, nodded with ambiguous enthusiasm, and set their plates down with uncharacteristic decisiveness. The Australians were cheerfully blunt and expected to win the Noble Prize in medicine for identifying the main cause for obesity in Americans. Without much of a leg to stand on, a condition only partially to blame on the amount of wine drunk, I pointed an accusing finger at the quality of Japanese sugar.

Japanese New Year
choking on a piece
of green tea mochi

by Bob Lucky
Hangzhou, China

Jeffrey Harpeng: NIGHT JOURNEY

2009-03-23T07:00:00.001-04:00

With her pillow and blanket she settles to sleep on her bedroom floor.

Later as I am heading off to bed, she is sleeping in her doorway, knees tucked under, bottom in the air, arms forward over her pillow. She is stretched, as in prayer, toward mummy’s bed in the room across the hall.

In the morning, on my way to breakfast, I find her on the floor just inside mummy’s room, still sleeping toward Mecca.

the long night journey
without wings
to morning
a chorus of crow
parrot and dove calls

by Jeffrey Harpeng
Macgregor, Qld., Australia

Benita Kape: ROCK MELON MOON

2009-03-20T07:00:00.001-04:00

nightdress . . .

slipping into my dreams
inside out

My brother has a house bus. Each summer he travels around the country working in orchards. This year he has decided to come to the district in which I live. Jokingly, I say, "Ask the orchadist if there might be a place for me." Next day I receive a phone call. "Come tomorrow at eight o'clock."

I have never worked in a fruit packing house. How will I cope with my fellow employees, young, fit people a third my age?

With sore muscles and bones, I survive my first full week. By the end of that week I have been placed at the end of the rock melon packing line. It is necessary that I work very quickly, very surely; and that in the evening I get very good rest.

In the morning I sing as I take my shower and try not to think too much of the day ahead and the difficult work in hand.

grading a distant moon
probably
size eight tonight

by Benita Kape
Gisborne, New Zealand