Issue 2 of MacQueen’s Quinterly is out and I am delighted to have a haibun triptych included! Many thanks to editor Clare MacQueen! Read “Noir” here and below:

Noir [A Triptych]

Snow white

A small room, white walls, white lino floor. Sheets like snow. Her deep breathing. Hair the color of frost. Beads of sweat on her forehead, in the folds of her neck. She is dreaming.

crow’s call
a night unlike
any other

and her life

A small room. Unmade bed, a chair toppled over. Two plastic cups on the floor. Walls of indistinct colour. The Book of Sand open at the foot of the bed.

no one here
lives like a princess—
mushy peas for tea

as it might have been

A room 5’x5′. No curtains. Aretha Franklin’s “I say a Little Prayer” from the room next door. Birds. On the pavement outside her window, fag ends and chewing gum.

diaphanous—
lives of others in frequencies
I can hear