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HAIKU CORNER – Issue 5

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
under a bloated sun
the smoke of a hundred wildfires
and five drops of rain
 

on the leaves of an
olive tree circle shadows
of turkey vulture
 

yucca petal
thrown upon the sword
of its own leaf
 

scrub jay
so wet it’s mistaken
for a stellar’s
 

in the dark of night,
under fishtail fern, an ant
walks across my neck
 

from the bridge
I touch an egret below
with my hand’s shadow
 
 
Justyn Hegreberg is a visual artist and writer based in Portland, Oregon. Their work has been shown in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, New York, Miami, Helsinki, and in New American Paintings #115. They founded a 252 square inch gallery on the table beside their bed. Bedside Gallery shows small work and publications from artists and writers from around the world.
 


SUMMER CYCLE
 
My daughter is eating
the tomatoes I planted
near her daisy patch
 
A happy garden–
colorful toys on the floor,
my daughter laughing
 
the fickle curtains–
my daughter plays peek-a-boo,
her life as a moth
 
Birds in the bath fly
to the fence and wait there for
a thirsty squirrel
 
Curling smoke, burnt meat,
the drone of lawnmower bees–
an ant hill on fire
 
Hot night in autumn–
the world must still be tilted
closer to the sun
 
The last tomatoes–
green, hard, delicious – ripen
by the cold window
 
 
Joseph E. Petta is a lifelong resident of Bergen County, NJ, where he grows his daughter and the occasional heirloom tomato. Formerly a librarian at Passaic County Community College, he currently teaches composition, reading, and library research skills at Felician University. He was inspired to write haiku so many years ago by the unadorned imagist poetry of William Carlos Williams.


 

Vetoed Triple Haiku
 

“And Alan Ginsberg’s back in town talking about god a lot.”
— Frank O’Hara

Indian summer
men’s wilderness rave weekend
outside Ukiah…
 
son proposes — three
generations including
two year-old Ben Blaze…
 
through our ecstasy’s
soft afterglow, my boy’s wife
bellows a hard, No!
 
 
Gerard Sarnat’s recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He’s authored four collections: HOMELESS CHRONICLES (2010), Disputes (2012), 17s (2014) and Melting The Ice King (2016) which included work published in Gargoyle, Lowestoft, American Journal of Poetry, Main Street Rag, New Delta Review, Tishman Review plus was featured in New Verse News, Songs of Eretz, Avocet, LEVELER, tNY, StepAway, Bywords, Floor Plan. Radius, Foliate Oak, Dark Run, Scarlet Leaf, Good Men Project, Anti-Heroin Chic, Winamop, Poetry Circle, Tipton Review, Creative Truth, Harbor Village, KYSO, Rumblefish and Ordinary Madness’ debut feature sets of new poems. “Amber Of Memory” was the single poem chosen for my 50th college reunion symposium on Bob Dylan; the Harvard Advocate accepted a second plus Oberlin, Brown and other universities in and outside the US accepted concurrent pieces. Mount Analogue selected Sarnat’s sequence, KADDISH FOR THE COUNTRY, for distribution as a pamphlet in Seattle on Inauguration Day 2017 as well as the next morning as part of the Washington DC and nationwide Women’s Marches. In August Failed Haiku presented his work first among over a hundred contributors. For Huffington Post/other reviews, readings, publications, interviews; visit GerardSarnat.com. Harvard/Stanford educated, Gerry’s worked in jails, built/staffed clinics for the marginalized, been a CEO of healthcare organizations and Stanford Medical School professor. Married since 1969, he has three children, four grandkids.
 


Cold, November field

Lone dove combs another row

Sorrow, its hunger

 

Swifts keep inscribing

An empty, cobalt tablet

With cursive goodbyes

 

The past, a molted

Snakeskin that misses itself

Swallowing life whole

 

The dawn discovers

Silver, autumn artifacts—

Trilobites of frost

 

This emptiness stays,

The way canyons hold shadows

On the brightest day—

 

He stepped on the porch

Her heart, a covey of quail

In all directions

 

A December mist lifts

Like her chilled breath before him,

Wreath filled with whispers

 

Hip-high goldenrod,

Memories of her touches

Brushing against him

 

From dark eye shadow

To those sometimes distant moods,

Dusk remembers her
 
 
Greg Sellers completed his undergraduate studies in English at Louisiana State University and holds a MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University and MLIS from the University of Alabama. His poems have appeared in Poetry, New Letters, Interdisciplinary Humanities, Zócalo Public Square, Spiritus, The Journal of Wild Culture and elsewhere. A recipient of a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship and Mississippi Literary Arts Fellowship, Sellers lives with his family in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where he is the administrative librarian at Hinds Community College.
 


 
 
she touches me
with her eyes
a well-meaning alligator
 
her dress in the wind
a meadow rolled sheer
flattened flowers
 
walking into yellow
colour compacting
egg yolk hardening
 
migrating flock
a nestling forgotten
northern wind
 
tattered bird
begs the ground before
a homeless person
 
a hole widening
her chest
a bird’s nest
 
Catriona Shine is an Irish writer, living in Norway, where she is also a practicing architect. She writes novels, short stories and Haiku. She was a runner up in the IAFOR Vladimir Davidé Haiku Award 2017 and her Haiku will be published in the coming anthology. That will be her first publication. Her novel-in-progress won the Penfro First Chapter Competition 2016, and was shortlisted in the TLC Pen Factor Writing Competition 2016. She is represented by Laetitia Rutherford of Watson Little in London.

 


 

Don’t imitate me

never simulate half an orange

cut in two

 

Even the street lights

seem farther apart –

a rainy May day

 

The waxing May moon

sails amid the clouds – how soon

from new to full

 

Afternoon well spent –

watching cherry and plum

blossoms drift in air

 

The journey from home

to dojo, one hour by train,

begins with one step

 

Spring sprouts clichés –

haikuists must dig

deeper furrows

 

Finally leaving Sag Harbor,

I smell the rotting mussels

dropped on the road by gulls

 

George Held has published more than 150 haiku, several of which have won prizes. His chapbook, Dog Hill Poems, his twentieth poetry collection, is forthcoming in 2017.
A retired Queens College professor, Held was a Fulbright lecturer in Czechoslovakia for three years and now serves on the executive board of The South Fork Natural History Museum, in Bridgehampton. His poems, stories, translations, and book reviews have appeared widely, in such places as Commonweal, Confrontation, New York Quarterly, 5AM and The Notre Dame Review. Garrison Keillor read one of Helds’s poems on NPR. An eight-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Held has had poems included in over three dozen anthologies. His twentieth collection of poems is Neighbors: The Water Critters (Filsinger & Co., 2015). geoheld7@gmail.com

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