Happy to see 2 of my stories from Feeding the Doves (Dream Island and Written) included (pp. 61-62) in issue 6 of the Romanian Journal Revista Kibo Titan! Grateful thanks to Clelia Ifrim and Dani Dumitrache!
Beyond Me There is a point at which thought unravels, where cosmic dust swims on waves our brains are not equipped to comprehend. This is the reason we learn to speak of concrete things caught by the senses – the fragrance of flowers, light and shadow, bird song, the weight of snow. Holding tight to the literal, we learn to survive.
My heartfelt thanks to editor Clare MacQueen for publishing this haibun in issue 7 of MacQueen’s Quinterly. It had originally appeared in the Wales Haiku Journal.
Lullaby
It’s at its loudest in the early morning hours. Before light dissolves darkness, before the neighbour leaves for work, before the birds start singing, his laboured breathing comes over the baby monitor whispering, gurgling, rattling, spluttering….
I lie awake listening to the crack of thunder, the roaring waterfall, the sounds of the sea emitted from his chest. A car starting, the exhaust backfiring, the train leaving station. The boat reversing in the harbour. Light rain. A soft meow. His breathing renders a whole world. In this soundscape, I make out the stories he told me when years ago he put me to bed.
Soon, light dispels the apparitions, and his breath comes over the monitor soft, steady, regular, lulling me to sleep.
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
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.
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. Enjoy!
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.
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!
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!
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 .
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.
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
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)…
Capturing a scientific symposium in a haiku sequence! Remember the #haiku sequence on the Ammerseeconference 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?
Literature, Art, and Life through the Lens of Haiku