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      May 12, 2025Hemat MalakAerodynamic Drag

      Why fly? Simple. I’m not happy unless there’s some room between me and the ground.
      —Richard Bach, A Gift of Wings
      When Anna, the mum with six kids, called me from the airport to say she was leaving, assuring me it’s true, most of me was horrified—her youngest was four! The other part of me was all awe and star struck and longing. I smelt pineapple—are there pineapples there—so fragrant I could taste it before my tongue, rivers of sweet juice running down my arms, sticky in the impossible sun, but me, who peels prawns with knife and fork, didn’t care. I walked along that beach, sand painting my rivers, painting my body with fuck it all. Seabirds screeched messages from home, but I don’t speak seabird. I adjusted my bikini—my bikini—and walked barefoot with my always-dressed feet, scratching up my pedicure like a wild thing. The rumble of a huge plane rattled the shells in my hand as it passed. The phone at my ear beeped in time with the washer announcing the end of the cycle.
       
      taking flight
      above
      the noise
       
       

      from #87 – Spring 2025

      Hemat Malak

      “I love everything about a haibun, especially the contrast between its long and short forms, and the ooh of the cuts between title and prose and haiku (so many spots for a poem to say, surprise!). I really enjoy the eccentricity of a haibun nattering on about something and then stopping, giving me a pensive look, and serving up a haiku.”

      May 11, 2025Carrie Jane BondRound Them Up

      Family With 2 US Citizen Children
      Deported by ICE After Traffic Stop
      Cheerios, dinner plates, wedding
      Rings—teapots and targets. Eyes
      On the circumference of your wrist.
      On a round table in my classroom
      With broken chairs: the globe.
       
      Holes punched in the left margin, being
      Left at the margins, not knowing:
      Will knuckles rattle their doors,
      Their shiny knobs bright, like that
      Once-new promise of America?
       
      Her torch blazes in the noonday sun
      Before, during, after the election
      From the island where she stands
      With eyes hooded and low, ever
      Watching over rough waters.
       
      I tell this mother on the phone
      From our classroom, cord curling ’round
      My fingers, we will do our best. They can
      Stand out there and press the doorbell,
      Ring forever for all we care.
       
      I am not worried, she assures me.
      Yet there is no list it is safe to be on—
      Everything being less sure. She is
      Less assured now, the news rolling
      On a twenty-four-hour cycle.
       
      A knock at the door is a knock
      In their hearts, thoughts spinning
      Round and round
      Like the vultures’ turning—silent
      Above the wide-open plain.
       

      from Poets Respond

      Carrie Jane Bond

      “‘Family With 2 US Citizen Children Deported by ICE After Traffic Stop’ is one of several headlines I have seen this week as ICE continues arresting and deporting Americans at a furious pace. As I work with children, some of whom are multilingual English learners, I have felt the ripples of fear in these communities most vulnerable to such blunt attacks. Attempts to round up those who are deemed ‘illegal’ is continuing despite errors, illegality, and an optics of horrifying cruelty. I am responding from my own outrage, that ‘give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ has given way to such headlines. I hope we as a country can remember who we are, or rather who we strive to be, and to remember what James Baldwin wrote oh so many years ago: ‘They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law — in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not respected, and to be outwitted in any way whatever.’”

      May 10, 2025Kim DowerI Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom

      breezy floral, dancing with color
      soft, silky, flows as I walk
      Easter Sunday and you always liked
        
      to get dressed, go for brunch, “maybe
      there’s a good movie playing somewhere?”
      Wrong religion, we were not church-goers,
        
      but New Yorkers who understood the value
      of a parade down 5th Avenue, bonnets
      in lavender, powder blues, pinks, hues
        
      of spring, the hope it would bring.
      We had no religion but we did have
      noodle kugel, grandparents, dads
        
      who could fix fans, reach the china
      on the top shelf, carve the turkey.
      That time has passed. You were the last
        
      to go, mom, and I still feel bad I never
      got dressed up for you like you wanted me to.
      I had things, things to do. But today in L.A.— 
        
      hot the way you liked it—those little birds
      you loved to see flitting from tree to tree—
      just saw one, a twig in its mouth, preparing 
        
      a bed for its baby—might still be an egg,
      I wish you were here. I’ve got a closet filled
      with dresses I need to show you. 
        

      from #48 - Summer 2015

      Kim Dower

      “I grew up on the upper west side of Manhattan—89th off Broadway—in ‘The Party Cake Building,’ apartment 6D, when NYC was still a place for middle class families, not just a city for the rich. I was the handball champion of the street, Benny’s hotdog stand and the New Yorker Bookstore on one side, Murray the Sturgeon King around the corner, rode my bike through Riverside Drive when I was ten (no helmets back then), went to the first ‘Be-In’ in Central Park. Though I’ve lived in Los Angeles for decades, my memories of New York sounds, smells, tastes, people, adventures continue to influence my poems. When I was a little girl I thought that only ‘TV families’ lived in houses. I never knew anyone with a yard, a ‘den,’ or a basement.”

      May 9, 2025Michael LaversThere Is a Fire

      We try. We water plants so we can watch 
      God bloom, we look at rivers till our sadness 
      feels beautiful. Tumult and peace 
      and tumult again, and we have no idea
      of what decides what rises and what falls. 
      My daughter combs her hair, 
      watching the snow come slantly down. 
      There is a world, through her, seeing itself. 
      We talk about objects because we cannot 
      talk about the hidden radiance. We talk 
      about how Arshile Gorky swam 
      into the Charles to end his life, 
      but then remembered painting, 
      and swam joyously back. Of pines, 
      of wind. Of how there is a mutual 
      wounding that’s required for love, 
      and although no one’s asking, I can answer 
      that I write about my children to obtain 
      for them life after death. Why else! 
      There is a fire at the heart of things 
      that can’t go out, and we are here, 
      and we remember it. We try. 
      A purple comb. Slant snow.
      My children are, which I don’t 
      understand, but no disaster’s possible. 
      I’m certain what they truly are was 
      never born. That though the sun 
      shall not endure, they shall endure.
       

      from #87 – Spring 2025

      Michael Lavers

      “The French painter and sculptor Georges Braque said: ‘In art there is only one thing that matters: that which cannot be explained.’ I don’t know what poetry is, where it comes from, why exactly I love it so much, or how it gets written. Nor, luckily, do I have to know. What a relief!”

      May 8, 2025Colette InezThe Play of Lovers

      Pears soft to the thumb, wine.
      Now the sun is the moon, each
      look a new word, phrases to arrange
      like roses in a vase.
       
      Lovers. Everyone has seen them fall
      into a blur of change; one leaf
      and then another on the lawn. Shade
      gives way to light. Snow comes down.
      Do you see them, two figures
      in the distance making their small mark?
       
      Words, too, submit to years. Plain
      flowers in the yard repeat their trick
      of vanishing. The sun is the sun
      and each look is seen again and again
      until faces disappear.
      Everyone has seen it.
       

      from #20 - Winter 2003

      Colette Inez

      “A poem is born right here, somewhere in my heart, in my blood vessels, in my gut. It comes to the brain much later. I have to feel them actually pulsing in my body, and then when they get shaped, when the brain, the controller, the pilot, whoever one’s metaphor, however this metaphor can extend, takes over. I like to think that my brain is the lesser part of my poems and that my heart, in the best of my poems, is the one that rules.”

      May 7, 2025Annette MakinoMigration

      Everyone just calls it “the gully.” It’s a bit of wilderness in the midst of our Southern California development. A creek runs through it, lined with eucalyptus trees.
       
      A winter’s day. I am around nine. Some friends and I come upon a strange sight: large clumps of dry leaves hanging from the trees. These turn out to be monarch butterflies—in fabulous numbers. Some fly around the gully and near our faces, bright flashes of orange like enchanted confetti. I hold out my hands and for an instant, one almost lands there.
       
      dappled light
      the untamed taste
      of sour grass
       
      Soon after, my parents divorce. My mother, sisters and I keep moving farther and farther away. Then to my mother’s native Switzerland for a year. The day after we fly back to California, my father stops by on his way to the airport. He is returning to his homeland of Japan—for the rest of his life.

       
      rope swing
      assessing the depth
      of my losses
       
      More than once over the following decades, he moves without telling us his new address. We see each other just three more times.

       
      return to sender
      the chrysalis
      unopened
       
      As for the monarchs, severe drought and disease take their toll. For a few years, the butterflies all but disappear from the gully. But now they are returning: last December, more than 26,000 were counted on a single day. In just four hours of flying, I could go back fifty years in time and see them again.

       
      arriving starlight
      his radiant smile
      in my dream
       

      from #87 – Spring 2025

      Annette Makino

      “Sometimes it feels absurd to try to convey the complexity and nuance of any human experience with just 26 letters—like using a mud-covered stick to paint the Sistine Chapel. I find that combining art forms is one good way to expand the possibilities for expression. As an artist, I enjoy working in the Japanese tradition of haiga: art combined with haiku so that both elements deepen our understanding of the whole. A similar process happens in a successful haibun: together, the prose and haiku expand the overall meaning in an intuitive way that neither could do alone. And suddenly, those meager 26 letters transport us to a new world.”