home alone . . . mother’s lipstick on her lips nude lipstick the teacher’s wry smile under her mask big sister’s lipstick . . . first date following his gaze to her mouth… lip reading lip liner learning to say no *** https://prunejuice.wordpress.com/2021/03/01/issue-33-senryu-kyoka/ In Prune Juice 33 (scroll down)
A woman reading a letter in the light pouring through an unseen window. Hair pulled back from the forehead, she is pictured in the style of her favorite painter against an expanse of soft yellows. Areas of blue for the shadows, the armchair and her top allude to hidden layers.
camera obscura
the temptation to see
depth
Her upper body is turned towards the light, held by it, trapped by it. Arrested in the moment, her Parkinson’s is invisible. In a minute or two, she’ll have to change position, align her spine, prevent stiffness from setting in.
Amsterdam to Delft…
in their seats now, the old couple
remove their face masks
This is a good day. In the early hours of the morning, she’d lain listening to the woodpecker hammering time. As the hours rolled in, she made fabric out of wool, squeezed poetry out of the daily grind, mailed her loved ones. Read their letters…
lapis lazuli…
shifting attention
to what matters
This haibun, a collaboration with artist and daughter Maria Pierides, appeared in the project Love in the Time of Covid
Maria Pierides’s art is for sale from Saatchi Art and from her website
Very happy to have “Portrait,” my haibun paired with art by Maria Pierides, appear in Love in the Time of Covid: A Chronicle of a Pandemic. Many thanks to editor Michelle Elvy.
To read, click here
insomnia
hoar frost
in my fridge
In “on the nail” haiku 2021
Dale Wisely says:
Delighted to announce a surprise, special issue of RIGHT HAND POINTING: Haiku 2021! (A nice set-up for our new print journal of haiku/senryu, first frost, coming this May). Thanks to our pal Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco for curating the issue.
Read it here
Enjoy!
first light
the woodpecker’s
drum roll
Third prize in the THF Kukai, January 2021
Here the writer is more obviously in the picture. We can easily imagine someone who is still in bed, waking to this familiar (and thereby reassuring) but perennially thrilling sound. The experience as conveyed has an energy that could well inspire optimism.
Commentary by Dee Evetts.
Thrilled to see my poem appear as (Per Diem) Haiku of the Day on the Homepagebof The Haiku Foundation! Many thanks to Ralf Broeker for including it in his collection on Spirits, and to Rob Scott for running the feature.
A Happy New Year 2021 to all my friends! A year filled with Health, Love, Creativity, Happiness, and Peace!
Meanwhile, still in 2020, JuxtaSix: The Journal of Haiku Research and Scholarship, the print issue, is available! I just received my print copy from Amazon. It is a very interesting and well-presented issue. I am happy to say it includes an article on Haiku and the Brain that I co-authored. Many thanks to the editors, and reviewers, and well-done to my fellow authors!
the weight
of our arguments
falling snow
Happy to see my poem included In the inaugural issue of the wonderful Blo͞o Outlier Journal!
Thank you, Alan Summers!
Delighted to see my work included in the new journal “tsuri-dōrō – a small journal of haiku and senryū.” The Inaugural Issue is just out! Have a read and submit!
Zoom meeting
a bird flies into
the window
Happy to see my haiku “hard frost” included in the “Sample haiku & senryu of Modern Haiku,” 51.1 Winter – Spring 2020!
.
hard frost
the hunter walks beside
the blood trail
.
You can find it here
Thrilled to have won first place in MacQueen’s Quinterly Ekphrastic Challenge “The Magician”!
A heartfelt thank you to Clare MacQueen for selecting my haibun “So that we remember” and congratulations to all participants in the contest!
Read “So that we remember” here: http://www.macqueensquinterly.com/MacQ3/Pierides-Remember.aspx
For the background to the contest and full results see here: http://www.macqueensquinterly.com/Contests/Magician-Results.aspx
I am very pleased to see my haibun diptych ‘Intertextuality,’ originally published in Sonic Boom 4, included in this Anthology! Grateful to editor Shloka Shankar!
Sonic Boom writes:
We are delighted to announce the publication of our second anthology, ‘What I Hear When Not Listening: Best of The Poetry Shack & Fiction, Vol. I.’
Featuring work by 41 contributors to our journal between the years 2014 and 2019, this collection brings together the best pieces that were published under The Poetry Shack and Fiction sections of the journal from issues one through fifteen.
Order your copy here
the daily transmutation of muscle into marble
In Bones 19, p.154
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:
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
Happy to see the article I co-authored “Reading English-language haiku: An eye-movement study of the ‘cut effect’” is now available in JEMR (Journal of Eye Movement Research).
The current study, set within the larger enterprise of Neuro-Cognitive Poetics, was designed to examine how readers deal with the ‘cut’ – a more or less sharp semantic-conceptual break – in normative, three-line English-language haiku poems (ELH)…
Do take a look!
hard frost the hunter walks beside the blood trail
In Modern Haiku vol. 51.1., p.77, Winter-Spring 2020
Capturing a scientific symposium in a haiku sequence! Remember the #haiku sequence on the Ammersee conference I wrote in 2018? It was included with the conference proceedings in a special edition of Visual Cognition, Vol. 27, issues 5-8, May/September Routledge, 2019 – (scroll to p.2 of the editorial). Why have a volume of papers when you can describe the whole thing in a few haiku? 
Great news! JuxtaFive is ready and available to read online! This edition of the Haiku Foundation Journal of Haiku Research and Scholarship includes several articles, reviews, haiga and a special section on Women Mentoring Women (and the article Knocking on the Doors of Perception on Haiku and the Brain contributed by me and co-authors: Thomas Geyer, Franziska Guenther, Jim Kacian, Heinrich Liesefeld, and Hermann J. Mueller).
Here
evening fog
the holes in the subtext
disappear
.
Very pleased to have this haiku in Bones 18, 15 November 2019, p. 150.
clinging
to the surface of things ...
melting snow
Haiku in HSA Members' Anthology 2019. Photo of installation by the British artist Cathy Wilkes commissioned to create the British Pavilion for the Venice Biennale in 2019.
haiga
Honoured to have my haibun “Homewards” included in “White Blossoms”
[An e-Collection of Photographs and Words] by Susan Tekulve in KYSO Flash 12!
{scroll down the page to “Magnolia blossoms and red clay”}
Many thanks to editor Clare MacQueen!
“White Blossoms:” “In addition to photographs and lyrical prose by essayist and novelist Susan Tekulve, this collection contains prosimetra by authors such as Rick Mulkey, Stella Pierides, Brenda Sutton Rose, and Carl Sandburg, among others.”
Delighted to see my #haibun “The Path” included in Califragile (July 23, 2019)
Many thanks to the editor Wren Tuatha!
Originally In Blue Fifth Review, Broadside #44 Fall 2016 with the beautiful painting below by Maria Pierides
In addition, full text here
Pleased to see my haiku in issue 127 of ‘Hedgerow’ edited by Caroline Skanne! Thank you Caroline!
Three of my haiku were translated into Bulgarian and included in the anthology Peonies edited by Iliyana Stoyanova! Thank you, Iliyana!
English Original
mother’s day
pushing all the wrong
buttons
Frogpond, 38:2, Spring/Summer 2015
Stella Pierides
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
母親節
激起所有強烈
的情緒
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
母親節
激起所有強烈
的情緒
Delighted to see my Mother’s Day haiku appear on Butterfly Dream today! Translated into Chinese by Chen-ou Liu!
Thank you Chen-ou!
Solace (Triptych)
In a dark wood . . .
Heaving streets, bulging with holiday shoppers. Shop windows in garish colours blink their version of hell. As soon as I get the present I came for, I head for home.
Running for the bus, I bump into someone, or he bumps into me. The double-decker reeks of wet clothes. A young woman, clutching her baby close to her chest, is arguing with the bus driver who refuses to let her on without a ticket.
We stay put for a good thirty minutes, until a passenger, with a shaking hand, taps his debit card on the card reader and pays the fare for her.
the baby babbles . . .
raindrops on
the bus window
and without props
It hasn’t rained for weeks. The two workmen in my back garden, digging the foundations for a cat enclosure, sound industrious. There is a young apple tree standing right in the middle of it, and I have instructed them to shorten its branches so that it can be contained within the structure. I imagine my two cats spending happy hours climbing it, perching on its branches. But when I look outside, I see the tree is missing. I am told it was taking too much space and they decided to remove it for me, at no extra cost.
short shrift
the town crier’s
hoarse voice
against freezing
I own five hot water bottles. As you might have guessed, I feel the cold more than others. When I place these hot, felt-wrapped receptacles on my coldest parts, I experience the bliss others must take for granted.
clang of a spade
I imagine the workmen
striking gold
In Open: Journal of Arts and Letters, 25 Feb 2019 h
and check out the whole journal: a rich and rewarding read!
3 of my tanka translated into Italian and published in Lumachine 31, December 2018
A big thank you to Euphemia Griffo and Stefano d’Andrea for including them in this wonderful Journal.
The ossuary, a white-washed, rectangular building, is dark and cool. A musty smell envelops me as I enter. I am searching for the metal box containing my mother’s bones.
I’ve been told she is confined to one on the shelves that run the length of the room. I start searching methodically. Each box has a small hand-written label with the deceased’s name on its front. Several labels are blank. One has a dried daisy flower stuck on it with Sellotape; another, a star in cross stitch; yet another, a tiny motorcycle sticker. Photographs of the dead looking youthful are taped to several boxes, or placed next to them, complicating identification of the containers’ occupants.
Disheartened, I leave the grim building to walk in the dappled shade of the graveyard. The hum of the city mixes with birdsong. So many years since I was in Athens. I stop to read the names of the deceased on headstones, marvel at the stone angels, at the oil lamps. Soon my head is swimming. A woman burning sweet-smelling incense over a grave turns to look at me. I quickly look away, but then, returning her gaze, I nod and she smiles.
noon heat
a hairline crack
in the angel’s wing
In Unbroken Journal, issue 20, 2019
Reality Bites
In my teens I spent school holidays in the local library. From opening to closing time, the library was my home. In the sizzling Athenian summers, it was the only cool place to be. The silence in the reading room felt like a blessing. Sitting at my desk I listened. A page turned. Someone shifted in their chair. Someone sighed. Silence again. I revelled in the sounds of human presence in this magic emptiness. A paradise. Except one day, when a cicada started singing. Having found its way in, it perched on Borges’s “The Book of Sand.” Heads turned. There was a commotion. A reader screamed, “Get this thing out of here!” The librarian, arm raised, raced to the shelf to swat the culprit, but the insect was no longer there.
turning the page
I come across the truth …
midsummer darkness
And yet
The road twists and turns for miles ahead. The refugee caravan moves haltingly forward. Mothers carrying their babies; dazed children, old people, the young, all stagger towards a safer future. Crossing the Red Sea, walking through deserts, wading across the Suchiate River, the caravan camps at Calais, rests for a night on Lesvos, repopulates the Sicilian city of Sutera, rows across river Evros. Razor wire carves memories on children’s skin. A voice over the megaphone: “Achtung, Achtung!” Babies are born, grow teeth, learn to speak. It rains, it snows, it shines. New words enter dictionaries. Poems emerge from sleeping bags.
each spring
breaking through the soil . . .
the human heart
We carry on
We turn out the lights, fall asleep and emerge head first into the real world. Belief, disbelief, nuance, knowledge; science, art, even poetry we leave behind. We enter this eternal world without walls, where we have control over nothing, yet we are nothing less than the seed of the cosmos. Here is our true home: fluid, quiet, boundless.
In the morning, once the alarm clock’s trill drags us back into consciousness, we dress in soft flesh, teeth and nails, and catch the bus to work.
oak leaves …
planning to live past
one hundred
In Blue Fifth Review, The Blue Collection 9: Home
Image: ‘Boat’ by Maria Pierides
Grateful thanks to Michelle Elvy and Sam Rasnake for publishing my Haibun Triptych in the special issue “The blue collection 9: Home” of the phenomenal Blue Fifth Review!
Photo magic “Boat” by Maria Pierides accompanies the triptych.
Check it out:
Blue Fifth Review … the blue collection: 9: home (Winter 2018 / 18.10)
