Owen Bullock: OUT OF THE VALLEY

1.

just about to take off
an autumn leaf
lands on the windscreen

The red echo. The purple glance. The orange hope. The yellow pun.

road trip
in the pause
at the intersection
birdsong

A bumpy road for ten Ks then a sign that says bumpy road. One side of the track washed out. The one lane bridge flooded. In the steep-sided valley a magpie’s call echoes like several magpies.

2.

on the day I have to
go into the school
it’s raining heavily
so my tears don’t show

I make a list of men I admire and their qualities. For the first time, I feel proud to be a man.

shadow
beside the parking lines—
the sign you don’t read

In the supermarket, my partner talks with an ex-work acquaintance without introducing me. It doesn’t matter, I commune with the other men in the store.

above the shopping complex
the wind wand *
and an empty flag pole

* A sculpture by Len Lye.

by Owen Bullock
New Plymouth, New Zealand

Helen Ruggieri: NEUTRAL COLORS

Watched a show on the Home and Garden channel last night about a decorator’s use of rust, beige, tan, gray and ecru providing a neutral background against which to display your objet d’art. On the way to work rust, beige, tan, gray and ecru. Burnt sienna, ocher, cream, manila, last oak leaves, frost blown tops of goldenrod, giant reeds, wild grasses.

If you stretched a wire between two poles and plucked it, it would vibrate forever. Once a sound is made the vibrations never stop. All the sounds the world has made are out there floating in the atmosphere.

If you had the equipment you might hook up the electrical impulses of your brain to musical instruments and play them with your mind—the brain’s music, EEG’s finding a way to sing in the world. The electrical pulse of our thoughts surging through our neural pathways making a sax play “Love Me Tender.”

I was walking the dog down by the river where there are ponds formed in abandoned gravel pits. At dusk a flock of Canada geese flew over us coming in low to settle onto the pond. They were no more than six feet over my head, honking and braking, the leaders splashing into the pond. The last of the light made their white bellies ghostly glows. The dog was barking. The disrupted air from the many wings raised my hair like static electricity tingles around you. Honking, barking, my pleasure cry.

I think of that music radiating forever in the atmosphere against the neutral noise, the unsorted background sounds of everyday.

........holding a shell
..............to my ear
......................my own music

by Helen Ruggieri
Olean, New York

Gina: JUST THIS ONCE

stop talking at me—
understand the silence

I blow at it
as it runs across the keyboard
[a beautiful form] the size of a match
head with multiple legs and rounded back
translucent, bright

from the depths of its evolution
an involuntary reaction
pulling into itself

it folds up—
the tiny spider stays
very still as if under a rock
or a leaf, and I can't see it, shining red

on the letter D
.................... [for diversion]

you need not
shout—simply face me
when you speak

by Gina
Launceston, Tasmania, Australia

Michael McClintock: ORDINARY SEDUCTIONS

.

Dolores rose early and, careless about buttoning up the front of her sky-blue house coat, under which she wore nothing, primped her small flower beds and mowed her rug-sized lawn, the dew fanning from the blades in a light spray that wet her legs and made a thin, tremulous rainbow in the air. The last thing she did was step to her front gate and carefully twine a strand of flowering vine from fence to mailbox post. Smiling, she then went into the house and I saw no more of her that day.

honeysuckle . . .

the mailman takes a sniff

as he closes the box

.

.

by Michael McClintock

Fresno, California

first published in Blithe Spirit, V12, N2, June 2002

Announcement: The Tanka Prose Anthology

.

Modern English Tanka Press Release

The Tanka Prose Anthology, edited with an superb Introduction by Jeffrey Woodward, includes cutting-edge tanka prose by an international coterie of writers. Represented in this ground-breaking anthology are: Hortensia Anderson, Marjorie Buettner, Sanford Goldstein, Larry Kimmel, Gary LeBel, Bob Lucky, Terra Martin, Giselle Maya, Linda Papanicolaou, Stanley Pelter, Patricia Prime, Jane Reichhold, Werner Reichhold, Miriam Sagan, Katherine Samuelowicz, Karma Tenzing Wangchuk, Linda Jeannette Ward, Michael Dylan Welch, and Jeffrey Woodward.

Baltimore, Maryland – September 5, 2008 – The Tanka Prose Anthology, edited with an Introduction by Jeffrey Woodward, has been published in trade paperback by Modern English Tanka Press. The Tanka Prose Anthology is vital evidence of the first flowering in English of an ancient Japanese genre—tanka prose, the wedding of prose and tanka in one unified composition. The great diversity in subject and style of the individual writings in this volume testifies to the versatility of this new medium in the hands of skilled practitioners. Whether the setting is urban or pastoral, an elegant interior or a rustic retreat, whether the time is contemporary and presently unfolding or archaic and retrospective, the revival of the ancient medium of tanka prose has proven equal to the immediate task. This first-of-its-kind collection draws upon the work of nineteen poets from eight different countries. The introduction offers a detailed survey of the genre’s history and of its evolving forms while an annotated bibliography directs the reader to related literature. Why is tanka prose so novel? Because it is so old. The present anthology announces that it is here to stay.


About Editor:

Jeffrey Woodward resides in Detroit. His poems and articles appear widely in periodicals in North America, Europe and Asia. He currently edits Haibun Today and acts in the capacity of Associate Editor for The Hypertexts. A collection of his Eastern and Western writings, In Passing: Selected Poems, 1974–2007, was recently published.

Available now from www.Lulu.com/modernenglishtanka, from major booksellers, and from the publisher. Complete information and a mail or email order form are available online at http://www.modernenglishtankapress.com/ Price: $12.95 USD. ISBN 978-0-9817691-3-4. Trade paperback. 176 pages, 6.00" x 9.00", perfect binding, 60# cream interior paper, black and white interior ink, 100# exterior paper, full-color exterior ink.

Contact:

Denis M. Garrison, owner
Modern English Tanka Press
443-802-1249
Email to dmg@themetpress.com

http://www.modernenglishtankapress.com/
.

Beverley George: ROADSIDIA

On an early morning walk through the streets of Christchurch, all is orderly. A row of restaurants opposite the river have left out chairs, tables, pot-plants overnight and the City Square is freshly swept.

I take a half day bus tour. The bus driver is knowledgable, political, outspoken. Shows the good with the bad, like the way the friable soil under a fashionable and expensive housing estate hollows into deep caves.

When I ask about an attractive tree with bristling foliage on the river bank, he answers instantly, “That’s a roadsidia.” Later he relents. “That’s roadside with ia on the end,” he says. “I don’t actually know. But people expect you to.”

He has plenty to say about the fallibilities of the legal system. “But it all looks so untroubled?” I say. “Restaurant furniture left out all night?”

“Oh it’s not your theft that’s the problem,” he says. “Twenty years for theft. It’s your murder—for drugs and alcohol – DandA – that’s your problem. Underfloor heating in the gaols and out after only four years cos you didn’t know what you was doing.”

He lets me off the bus where I am to meet haiku poets for lunch.

“Don’t forget roadsidia,” he insists, “put that in one of your poems.”

Where I have been invited to meet other haiku writers for lunch there is a demolition site—a hole in the ground. The poets are from other cities, obviously unaware of changes. I check with a receptionist two doors away.

“Burned down,” she says. “It didn’t reopen elsewhere but there is a vegetarian restaurant a few blocks from here.” She writes down the address.

In the City Square in front of an imposing Cathedral, a Japanese girl is taking a violin from its case.

violin, bagpipe
flute and didgeridoo
fight in the air

I find not one, but two, vegetarian restaurants. They are located in a streetscape of sex shops, varying only minimally in the inventiveness of their displays. Gas masks leer from an army disposal store. My friends are nowhere to be seen. They know where I am staying. Perhaps there will be a message back at the hotel.

I pass back through the Square. There is no sign now of the violinist or the flute player.

bagpipe music swells
the didgeridoo player
turns up his amp

The day is balmy; the sky cloudless. I approach a wide pedestrian crossing, humming. A car pulls up on the left. I am halfway across when a red sedan screams around the corner from the right nearly striking me. The driver’s window is open. “Slow down,” I yell.

I am almost across when I hear screeching and the car spins around in a u-turn. There’s no time to think but instinctively I dart into the open door of a newsagency. There is a man of about fifty and a youth behind the counter. Quickly I explain the incident. The older man glances out at the car. “Go and hide at the back of the shop,” he says. “Stay out of sight.”

I duck behind fixtures. Slip off my rust-covered coat which is all the man in the car and his female companion will have noticed. Time is slowed, unreal. One part of me sees the whole thing as ridiculous, the other that this is exactly how terrible things happen. Out of a clear blue sky.

I can partly see the car through the shop window. The passenger door opens and the female is thrust out onto the pavement. She staggers, then enters the shop I am in, stares around. Has she been sent on a mission to take care of me? She wanders out again. “Stay there,” the shopkeeper warns me.

I can see only the top half of the sedan. The passenger door is open and the driver is banging his head against the steering wheel. A few minutes later the woman re-enters the newsagency. This time she buys some drinks and takes them back to the car which screams off across the pedestrian crossing and around the corner.

“She was carrying a bag from the chemist shop,” the shopkeeper says. “Best not to get in their way though. You never know.” I am grateful that he has taken this uncertain situation seriously.

He follows me onto the footpath and taps my arm.

“Don’t let it spoil your day,” he says.

Back at the hotel there is no message from my friends.

On my floor, the maid is cleaning at the other end of the corridor.

“I got you your flat pillows you wanted, dear,” she calls. “I got you two. Will that be enough?”

by Beverley George
Pearl Beach, NSW, Australia

Patricia Prime: IN THE STUDIO

.

From the ferry it’s a long walk uphill to my friend’s 30s villa, perched on a hillside overlooking the Hauraki Gulf.

When I reach the house Stella takes me through the central passage of the four-room cottage to a door leading to the veranda. The steep garden is terraced: on one terrace is an herb garden, another contains a vegetable garden and the third flowering shrubs and fruit trees. On the side of the property a creek takes the overflow water down to the beach.

At the back of the house, she has built a studio. I’m amazed at the disarray in the room compared to the traditional furniture in the living room and the comfort of the kitchen. “Don’t mind the mess,” exclaims Stella, “I have a good clean once a year!” The studio is a generous size with large windows overlooking treetops to the sea. But it seems stifling at first, with mounds of old newspapers, half-squeezed tubes of paint, jam jars full of brushes, books, and a deep crust of dried paint on the surfaces and floor. “I need disorder,” she laughs, “I need to remain in the same state of mind for several days in order to contemplate my painting.” Pinned to the walls are several unstretched canvases, which she works on simultaneously: a little dab of cadmium yellow here, a brushstroke of ultramarine there.

fixed easel
the sitter’s wooden chair
beside a wood stove

Stella has pinned several coloured postcards on the wall of works she admires: van Gogh’s “Sunflowers,” Braque’s “Man with a Guitar,” Cezanne’s “The Pasha.”

When it’s time to leave, Stella gives me a present: a jar of homemade quince jelly from the fruit in her garden and a postcard-sized drawing of her gardening boots—“a la van Gogh,” she smiles.

as I walk to the ferry
the pattern of clouds
in water

by Patricia Prime
Auckland, New Zealand

Bob Lucky: SMALL JOURNEY MEDITATIONS

.

stepping out walking home stepping out walking home
stepping out walking home stepping out walking home
stepping walking stepping walking stepping walking

home the smell of coffee in my mustache

by Bob Lucky
Hangzhou, China

Michael McClintock: MAZATLÁN IN JULY

.
.....1


heat lightning . . .
........................all the way into Mexico
...........the mountains rise

That was an omen, but we did not recognize it at the time.

At the airport taxi depot no one had ever heard of the hotel shown on our reservations document, or of Calle Pescado where it was located. There was no Roshi, and no “Let’s Get Acquainted” ginko walk, to welcome us.

“But no matter,” our smiling concierge said. “No one come to Mazatlán in July. Very bad time of year for visit. You find many hotels most empty. They happy to welcome you as best guests.”

Later, outside the empty Hotel Maria where we’d checked in, my friend Thomas remarked, “Looks like we got snookered, Pops. Told you it was too good to be true. Four nights in Mazatlán for two, with all meals and roundtrip airfare, for $270? What were you thinking?”

I hadn’t told him the air tickets were purchased for full price with the promise of a cash rebate at the Pollo de Playa Hotel. That was the hotel that didn’t exist.

Young Thomas was a haiku poet whom I was mentoring at the time. Our misadventure seemed a good place to begin his serious introduction to the ways of haiku and the resiliency of the haijin.

“It doesn’t matter,” I told him. “Let go of regrets. Live life in the moment, in the here and now.”

..........2


.....going the other way,
.....a woman with six kids
.....and raccoon eyes

Except for this family, the beach stretched long and peopleless into the murk, hot and humid. Thousands of stranded jellyfish littered the sand to landward of us. The sky was completely overcast and the air a thick, ugly soup of splotched grays and yellowish, half-lit whites, vast pockets of it dead and motionless, as if held in place by some invisible pressure dome, while in other areas, on land and out over the ocean, wind gusts whipped and swirled. A paltry, fetid place, smelling of Ivory Liquid soap, sour tequila-and-fruit drinks, and rotting flesh.

It really was shockingly bad, but I did not let Thomas know I felt that way.

“Let’s collect material for a haibun,” I suggested.

Thomas pulled a pint of Southern Comfort from inside his belt and took a hit. “Just great,” he said. “The sun is shining and the fun has begun.”

We began to walk, staying near the water and avoiding the jellyfish. We’d left our shoes and our copies of R. H. Blyth’s Haiku—Volume III: Summer, back at the hotel. We both enjoyed the smooth, silky feel of the sand on our bare feet, but I wished we had brought the books.

“Let the experience of each moment flow, one into another,” I was saying. “Take it all in, make no judgments. There need be no purpose to our journey but the journey itself . . .” And so on and so forth.

“Aw, jeez,” Thomas moaned.

He had stepped on a syringe. The needle appeared to have gone clean through the webbing between his big and second toes, left foot.

I felt myself gag.

..........3


.....how huge
.....must be your teeth,
.....wandering sand flea

We had wandered into a debris field of some sort, exhaled by a sewer pipe or upchucked from some undersea shelf.

I brushed at the sand around his foot, to get a look at the syringe: the syringe was empty. I wasn’t sure what that meant. The more I brushed at the sand, the more objects I discovered. Every pointy, jagged, bladed horror imaginable was in that sand. Each wave sent a shallow fan of foaming water over the area, reburying the mess. Instantly, the sand fleas re-emerged in their biting millions.

How deep we were in the field I could only guess, but I thought it safe to assume we were only at the edge of it. We needed only to back out a few feet. Quickly, without making a moment of it or saying anything alarming, I pulled the needle from Thomas’s foot and threw it aside. He passed out, either from terror or from whatever had been in the syringe.

I had to drag him out of there. But he was dead weight—a big man, about 240 pounds. The thin tank top he wore tore away in my hands. His flesh was wet and slippery from the humidity. I couldn’t just bend over and drag him or scoop him up. I could get no grip on him. I needed some kind of harness, so I improvised. I wore no undershorts but that seemed hardly to matter now. I took off my pants and tied a leg snugly under each arm. This gave me the leverage and grip I needed; I covered about a foot of ground with each straining pull . . . .

That’s when the police showed up—five men piled on a tiny three-wheeled all-terrain vehicle, flying the Mexican flag from a whip antenna. They were not smiling and they were armed with rifles.

I then saw that my wallet had popped from my pants pocket. The surf picked it up and sucked it away as I watched.

..........4


.....sunlight comes through it—
..........a narrow slot
...................................for the passage of meals

I don’t know where Thomas is but a Mexican attorney has told me that I am in the Municipal Jail not far from the Divina Providencia hospital in downtown Mazatlán, and not to worry about Thomas. The cell I am in is very small, like a closet, with no windows, a solid door, and one electric light bulb in the ceiling, which is controlled from the outside. I have been charged with vagrancy, public lewdness, possession of drug paraphernalia, and either mayhem or attempted murder.

“Well, which is it?” I sneered at him.

“That depends,” he said. “Señor, you have no identification. I believe, but they do not believe. They want to know who are you. They want to know why you come to Mazatlán in July . . .”

by Michael McClintock

Fresno, California

first published in Raw Nervz V7, N3, October 2001

Jeffrey Winke: CURLED UP IN THE EMBRACE

Indelibly kissed by fog, her silky, cool, glowing skin makes her allure intoxicating. When she parts her glistening pink lips to whisper the words, all leggy and curled up in the embrace of the mustard-color soft-leather armchair, she has only to avert her dream-laden, dark-eyed gaze to any of the eager-to-please and her most obscure, unattainable desire will be attained. Seduction is thrice promised but never fulfilled. She relishes the tease as delayed payback for the roly-poly, fat-girl teasing heaped meanly upon her younger self. She will never forget, never forgive.

quickie mart
silver crumbs from a crumpled
scratch off

by Jeffrey Winke
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Juliet Wilson: COLINTON DELL, EDINBURGH

.

The riverbanks profuse with flowers — hot pink rosebay willow herb, bright white umbellifers and too many yellow species to count.

.

The wild carrot and cow parsley alive with insects, the thin vivid red of soldier beetles, the rigid black of flies that move their wings to reveal lemon yellow bodies, the tiny irridescent black beetles that gather in groups.

.

A strange lack of birds, explained by the call of a sparrowhawk.

heat haze—

a dragonfly black

against the sky

by Juliet Wilson
Edinburgh, Scotland

Lynne Rees: ACROSS THE POND

Antibes Journal II

UK Correspondent: Lynne Rees

8.

Bags of rubble accumulate at the side of the house. Half a dozen at first, then a dozen, then more that turn the corner of the house and are stacked along the roadside wall, until we run out of ground space and they’re piled on top of one another, and we stop counting. Sacs à gravats—thick, black plastic bags we bought at Castorama and heavy, white woven sacks the maçons brought with them—full of hollow clay bricks from the dividing walls we’ve knocked down, chunks of rock from the false windows we’ve opened up, broken floor tiles, wallpaper of every thickness and material and design, from every decade of the last century, metres of shattered wooden moulding, every length of old wire and stretch of iron pipe that ran through each of the four storeys. The flesh and bones of the house stripped out.

portraits of strangers
in the corner of the attic
someone else’s dust


9.

When we take out the fireplaces and their chimney breasts I keep hoping to find a reminder of the people who have lived here during the last hundred years: a coin, a shoe, something secreted away. There is only old iron, sooty terre cuite and stone. These are the things that held up their lives, not what they added to decorate it.

I examine the two framed pastel portraits signed by an Italian artist. The woman wears a blue dress; her face is flushed and smiling. The man is bearded, in a jacket, waistcoat and cravat. A watch glints from his pocket. What happened to them? Were they happy here? Were they kind to each other? Did he hold her and tell her that he loved her? The way Tony holds me and tells me not to worry?

10.

My soucis:

• the kitchen units will arrive and there will be no floor laid in the kitchen
  we will not have a bathroom by the time we move in
  the new windows will not fit
  we will fail the diagnostic test by Gaz de France
  we will run out of money
  the roof will leak

all the puddles
I step in
yesterday’s rain

11.

The maçons dig up the old tiles on the kitchen floor, hack away at the concrete screed beneath and come to damp sand.

When my parents moved into their house 51 years ago there was no garden, just sand pegged out with fence posts. Only dunes separated them from the sea, 200 yards away. My father brought in topsoil and turf. Over the years he dug in compost and manure. Today their garden flourishes with potatoes, onions, carrots, cabbages, runner beans, soft fruit, but if you dig deep enough you still find the sand. The grains bury themselves in the quick of your nails.

12.

almost a ‘local’
the neighbour’s ginger cat
ignores me

The people who live at Le Grillon, another of the few original houses that remain in Avenue des Chênes, invite us for an aperitif on Saturday lunchtime in order to introduce us to some neighbours. ‘In France, an aperitif is always at midday,’ Madame tells me on the phone, and we make sure to appear by 12.10 at the latest.

Only two other neighbours are there and the six of us sit in a circle handing around a plate of thinly sliced brioche spread with liver paté. They tell us about:

• the unpleasant neighbours
  tourists parking right outside their gate
  the neighbour who shot himself in the foot trying to kill a rat
  
  

We tell them about:

• the walls we have knocked down
  the windows we have opened up
  the plans for our house-warming—la crémaillère—at the end of the year
  
  

Just before two o’clock there’s a noticeable shift downwards in the briskness of the conversation and our excuses to leave are quickly accepted.

13.

A week of sun and rain. The season hasn’t settled yet but there are lots of women, usually in pairs, who walk past the house to the beach in the late morning, and back up towards their apartment blocks at the end of the afternoon. They wear brightly coloured, long-sleeved beach tops made from some sort of voile that flutters around them in the breeze but still modestly covers their bottoms. Mostly they speak Dutch or Norwegian and I imagine a whole country of middle-aged, northern women living together at the top of the steep Sentier de la Vertu.

50th year
‘bikini line’ slips down
my list of things to do

14.

While I am scraping thick vinyl off the lounge walls, Tony takes a break from filling holes with colle universelle and plays the piano. The piano is the only piece of furniture in the house, the only piece we bought from the old proprietor, and, while it needs tuning, when Tony plays I can feel the house breathing, as if music is what it’s been waiting for. He plays the theme from ‘Love Story’.

When the movie first came out in the 70s my older sister went to see it with some friends and came home with tears streaming down her face. I laughed at her standing in the kitchen and sobbing but when I went to see it the following week I was the same wet wreck and cried for days afterwards. Where do I begin, to tell the story of how great a love can be… A girl who loved Mozart, the Beatles, and me… Love means never having to say you’re sorry. Song lyrics, script, cliché—but as vivid in my memory as any real experience. At thirteen, I had never imagined there could be such sadness, that life could be so unfair.

This is a love story too. A love story with a house that came to be ours through a whole string of coincidences. And here I am with my couteau à grattoir and my décolleuse standing on a stepladder scraping walls back to their original surfaces. And there is Tony closing the piano lid. And on the other side of the French doors the sun spatters the terrace through the leaves of the plane trees. And Tarek, one of the maçons, comes in and says, Madame, j’ai fini la cuisine. And here is our first floor laid. A blue tile, aged with ochre and cream, called La Douce France.

washing-up
the evening’s last shimmer
of sunlight

by Lynne Rees
Antibes France

Haiku Credits:
‘50th year’ was first published in ‘Planet, The Welsh Internationalist’, August 2007

Click here to read the first instalment of Antibes Journal.

Michael McClintock: MEN OF PROPERTY

I let my eyes and hands run over the tools he had used—the trowel, the spade, the mulching fork. I gazed at the few remaining tin pails, enameled green, and recalled how the one got its crimped side and the other its bullet hole. I pocketed the worn canvas gloves; the man buying the place had much smaller hands than dad’s, and could not wear them. But all the tools and pails and contents of the shed he said he would use, and would be grateful to have them.

I stepped out of the shed and walked onto the broad sloping hillside, only a small corner of which belonged to the property. The shed was planted in the middle of six rows of fruit trees, six trees to a row, with extra room made for the shed and open ground around it for loading boxes with fruit from the buckets: oranges, lemons, plums. I could still hear my father from somewhere in the trees calling to my brother and me, to bring him a ladder, or come get the dog, or haul out the pails full of fruit, or stop horsing around and go in to supper—he’d follow.

hefting a plum—
I know by heart
my father’s orchard

by Michael McClintock
Fresno, California
first published in Anthology of Days (Backwoods Broadsides, No. 70)

Bob Lucky: A KIND OF NON-ATTACHMENT

.

I follow her for three blocks trying to identify the flower tattooed on her calf, but for the first time in years the crosswalk lights are with me and she never stops.

cloudy afternoon
a lady bug leaves me
empty-handed

by Bob Lucky
Hangzhou, China

Eric Burke: BY NATURE

.

The vacant field in which my father's dandelions were growing was now on fire. Neighbors whose yards bordered the field were rushing in, shouting, trying to beat the fire out with shovels. He was, I saw, among them.

whatever the opposite of fine

that kind of marker—

painting my toenails black

by Eric Burke

Columbus, Ohio

Adelaide B. Shaw: CICADA SUMMER

.

No way to escape the incessant whining. That slow moan building to a crescendo then fading only to start anew. The seven year cicada. Or is it fourteen? The heat builds along with the din. Sluggishly moving days. Even in the dark hours no appeal is granted.

icy lemonade
sliding down my throat–
the glass against skin

by Adelaide B. Shaw
Millbrook, New York

Thomas James Martin: EYE OF THE STORM

.

I was ten when Hurricane Hazel passed over our farm in the Piedmont. I really wanted to see that eye. When the wind stopped howling, I rushed out the back door. In the stillness my eyes were drawn upward.

so quiet
the weeping willow
straightens

.

.

by Thomas James Martin

Beaverton, Oregon

Michael McClintock: AFTERNOON GARDEN

For the time being, well past noon, God, I ask that you above all leave me alone, that I might just sit here in the leaf shade, beside the wall with its swallow-thrown shadows and the easy, unmended thoughts time affords me: these solid forms of pots, flush with zinnias, and the sun patch fading where the grass snake glides unknotted.

a hollow tree
the beginning
of dusk
.

.

by Michael McClintock
Fresno, California
first published in Anthology of Days (Backwoods Broadsides, No. 70)

Eric Burke: LOSING A THUMB

.

Someone long ago hammered a nail into the maple that was now ours. At 8, I became enamored of slip-knots; listen, if I tell it right, you can almost hear me screaming, my father busy in the basement, my mother frantic trying . . . .

belly exposed to the sky
watching wind in the locust trees

by Eric Burke

Columbus, Ohio

Mary Mageau: A PARTING GIFT

.

A note was passed to me in French class. I opened it and read, ‘Patrick McKinnon really likes you, Mary Jane.’ After school I saw Patrick loitering near the oak tree on my corner. As I passed he called out, ‘Hey, Mary Jane, I’ve got somethin for you.’ Then without warning he put his arms around me and pressed his clenched lips hard against my mouth. I was able to struggle away from him and run toward the safety of home.

Soon afterward the McKinnon family moved away from our town. Patrick was long forgotten until years later when I unexpectedly came upon his name.

first kiss
now plastic flowers
decorate your grave

by Mary Mageau

Samford, Qld., Australia

first published in Paper Wasp, Winter 2008

Barry Smith: RUSTED HOLDEN

Yesterday we happened upon a couple of young aborigines. They were pleased with the big blue prawn they’d caught at the nearby waterhole. They smiled. Unsullied by age or the influence of modern living their teeth were beautiful. We smiled back.

From our vantage point today we can feel it. We can hear it too, the silence of sixty thousand years. As far as the eye can reach the altar cloth of earth spreads out into a haze of eucalypt and smoke. Apart from the fires of lightning man the landscape is barely changed.

Behind us are their galleries. On the walls are layers of ochred art, most of it within reach and under the sandstone overhang. There are human figures and animals, even a Thylocene. Many appear to relate stories, probably dreamtime stories. Some appear in inaccessible, even impossible places. We wonder if these are derived from a different epoch or are they created a scaffold of bush poles? At our feet are the pocks of their palettes. These are conical ochre grinding holes, each as deep as its age. Their pestles are nowhere to be seen, all probably souvenired and gracing someone’s museum or lounge room.

At the back of “Big Bill’s” nearby cave is the deep litter of ages; bones, ashes and charcoal, and flints. On the wall Bill has stencilled his hand and has drawn, in ochre, the outlines of a pearling lugger; even put a name on the boat. Someone has drawn a line in the dust to indicate a future archaeological dig. In the topmost layer we see the sawn bones and bottle tops. At the foot of the slope …

half buried in the sand
two burnt out hulks rust
a Ford, and a Holden.

by Barry L Smith
Hamilton, New Zealand

Michael McClintock: THE FACE ON THE FLOOR

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The only time I saw her face in twenty years as her neighbor was on that one day in October when she failed to retrieve the morning newspaper from her doorstep and I with two other neighbors opened her front door—it wasn't locked—after knocking and ringing her doorbell, getting no response, and found her dead but still warm in a simple flower print house dress on her living room floor with her blue eyes open and her small, delicate arms and hands flung outward in a gesture of surprise and rapture. I stood gazing at her face the full hour it took for the coroner to arrive and place her on a gurney and unfold a clean sheet over her entire length—covering that face which was one of the most beautiful and perfectly guileless and unforgettable I have ever seen.

heavy drapes,
a carefully-made bed—
a life like that

by Michael McClintock
Fresno, California

first published in Anthology of Days (Backwoods Broadsides, No. 70)

Miriam Sagan: MOUND HAIBUN

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Suburban Cincinnati, at the Oddfellows Cemetery, 19th century graves marked by classical columns, urns, and obelisks—these last monuments Egyptian and therefore somehow suited to the dead as if these middle-class Germans were pharaohs. Names erode from the softer marble but not the granite.

the tops
of abandoned grain silos

festooned in trees

Flag limp in the breezeless day. And a mound—covered in grass and trees—in the center of the graveyard. This was a burial mound too, probably of the prehistoric Adena people. Once these mounds were everywhere by rivers and floodplains, until eroded by farming and development. There is also another mound here, small and spotted with the incursion of graves.

The cemetery protects these mounds, as does a local golf course.

And there is a large mound in Water Tower Park, which itself is just a strip of green alley between family houses. The mound is somber, looming, overgrown. Artifacts might include bones, a shaman's pipe, bronze antlers, hands carved in mica.

a dark feeling
in the maze
of dreams

Plastic swing sets litter the lawns, and the water tower also looms. This is an in-between place.

Facing the street is a white Victorian, gray shingled, with a handsome wrap-around porch. There are so many levels of time here that memory can't unravel them.

house on a small hill
beneath a running sky
storm clouds, then thunder

.

.

by Miriam Sagan
Santa Fe, New Mexico

Announcement: Biennial British Haiku Society Haibun Anthology 2009

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Entries are invited for this prestigious international event, the purpose of which is to help raise the quality and range of the haibun genre, which combines poetic prose and haiku.

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

Conditions of entry: Open to all, except BHS Committee members and any others involved with the administration of the anthology. Entries 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 each submission. Copyright reverts to the author after publication in the anthology. In the unlikely event of an insufficient quantity and/or quality of submissions, those that are received will be carried forward to the following year for consideration.

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 e-mail address (if applicable). The other two copies should carry no identification. Entries on disk (floppy or CD, in Word format) are also acceptable and in fact preferred. If you require receipt of your entry, please either request an e-mail acknowledgement or send an SAE, or, for those overseas, an IRC stamped by the originating office.

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

Closing Date: In hand by 1st February 2009

Assessment and appraisal of entries: 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 explanation and commentary on their selections. It is anticipated that the Anthology, whose title will be drawn from the selected haibun, will be published by Christmas 2009. All those whose work is included in the volume will receive one copy of the anthology.

Diana Webb: TAXIDERMY

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In a dark recess of the local museum, stuffed birds—bittern, heron in dusty glass cases—reminiscent of exhibits in the museum of my childhood, the big house in Broomfield Park through which Miss B. who once darted from a sum-filled blackboard to point out the first swift would lead us on our weekly nature walks. A stone's throw from the road where Stevie Smith lived and wrote of it, 'How sweet the birds of Avondale.'

found feather

between my fingers

splayed and smoothed

.

.

by Diana Webb

London, England