“I became ill experiencing sudden and severe side effects with nothing to do but hope for time’s restoration. Writing these haiku became a means of journaling, documentation, expression, and healing. The narrative utilizes a range of contemporary haiku sub-genres and structures, including single-line haiku (traditional in Japanese), concrete haiku, tercets, and what I call ‘beautiful monsters’ without name. Some of the poems use seemingly impossible language to convey a real experience. Haiku, as a minimalistic art form, invites the reader to be an active participant in the poem’s unfolding. For those new and not-new to contemporary haiku, I hope you enjoy the collaboration.”
April 24, 2025Matt JosephA Skeleton Walks into an Art Class
where it sees the living,
trying their best to paint a skeleton
doing what skeletons do, which is lots of hanging around
on metal stands, their eye sockets
bony cups filled with silence,
or doing what skeletons don’t do, normally,
like cuddling, or giving birth,
given the lack of a womb
or a lover, though it may have had both
when it was wrapped in flesh and sinew,
filled with organs and desires and doubts,
but in the painting, it’s just bones on a bed,
femurs wishboned apart, pelvis spitting a baby out
onto the sheets, which makes the visiting skeleton think,
hell, anything’s possible, so let me invite a buddy,
and we’ll paint the living,
doing what they do,
which looks a lot like trying hard to forget
they’re a flash of dry lightning, or a strand of hair
stuck in amber, or maybe a lonely particle
in a million-mile dust storm, but also, most importantly,
their life is a warm, cozy duvet
momentarily draped around a skeleton
that’s biding its time, impatiently
waiting for the big reveal.
Image: “Siblings Under the Skin” by Elizabeth Eve King. “A Skeleton Walks into an Art Class” was written by Matt Joseph for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, March 2025, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.
“As soon as I saw the title I was hooked. I love its humor, and treatment of skeletons as individuals. I love the simplicity of words and depth of emotion. I love that it somehow captures my work in words. I love the symmetry. I love the music of the words. I love the image and idea that we are a ‘warm, cozy duvet’ wrapped around our bones. That we spend our time trying to forget we are ‘a flash of dry lightning, or a strand of hair stuck in amber.’ I also loved many of the others and was deeply moved by a few. All of the twenty -nine poems I read are honestly wonderful and deserving of publication. I loved the incredible diversity that sprang from a single, albeit complex, image.”
April 23, 2025Engin GülezAbsence
It wasn’t the best way to start a conversation. He muttered the first words that came to mind. They sounded like gibberish. His sister didn’t even notice. She was texting on her phone. “Did you say something?” she asked without looking at him. He didn’t answer. He had no answer. God knows what he was thinking when he came here. He left the room.
“When I’m in a bookshop browsing prose books, I sometimes flip through the pages to see if the writer has included a poem here and there. If I find one, I always read it first. Poetry has always been my first love, so if the prose books don’t have any poems, I feel a bit disappointed. Haibun is the perfect literary form for me. Ever since I read some examples from Basho, I’ve been hooked. However, it took me quite some time to write my first haibun. This year, I’ve been writing more haibun than ever, and I’m loving it. I’m excited to see where the form takes me.”
“I’m having a hard time believing Senator Chris Van Hollen actually did meet Kilmar Abrego Garcia, despite several photos of them together and announcements by so many news sources. This hasn’t happened to me before, but I’ve read bits and pieces of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and heard of the concept (misquoted apparently) all over social media. I’m trying to feel how this feels and understand it better in myself, and, as usual, writing poems is how I make sense of everything. Also, nature and movement, so I’m heading out now into the higher foothills for a walk.”
April 21, 2025Arlene DeMarisSeventeen
The looseness of his age and a dozen beers
save him. Walk the boy to the road and stand him up
in my headlights, torn red flag of one hand
waving me down. What is it the night’s long arms love
about a drunk? Its dim trees welcome mistakes, its ditches
cradle wrecks in skunk cabbage, every seventeen
years another child flown out a windshield, bent
for good, stopping traffic. I hold his face to mine, read
the skin of his arm blue with bible verses, my fingers
pure as well water, and cold. Between his rips
on the county road and my visits with the dead,
grief blooms, while overhead in dark branches, giddy
from their graduation dance, cicadas raise their saw blades,
“My poems are postcards from the Bardo, that liminal ether where I find myself turning the corner into later age. They are a way of saying wish you were here to my future self and whatever entity is to come after her. I write for the mysteries that have always confounded me—god, outer and inner space, the human heart, age and decline, the afterlife—and that have only deepened with time.”
April 20, 2025Pamela Lucinda MossThe Library’s Roof Is a Meadow
When the librarian knocks at my door, I ask
if she has a warrant that’s been signed by a judge.
She says no, and I wonder if she wants to talk
about my bibliographic record, or discuss my requests
for interlibrary loans. I have long sought asylum
in the stacks that border on the self-help section,
found sanctuary in the shelves that carry the 158.9s,
but honestly, since the pandemic, I’ve resettled
in the digital land of Libby that lacks the concept
of overdue status—when your time is up,
that’s it. Your items are just disappeared.
I haven’t seen you in a while, the librarian says,
but I’ve been thinking about how I used to check you out
and catalog your cards that were so green,
like the eco-friendly grass on the library’s roof,
that naturalized meadow, and I’ve been wondering
if you’d shelve your solitude and join me there,
in solidarity, because a place of renewal
should be everybody’s birthright, and I miss
your astonishingly undocumented, circulating love.
“I’ve been feeling heartbroken lately—by everything, really—and one of the ways I’ve been coping is by writing love notes to the things I do not want to lose. When I heard about the massive funding cuts to libraries, I thought of the librarians who’ve quietly and consistently cared for our communities. This poem is for them—for libraries, for immigrants, for LGBTQ+ people, and for everyone in this country trying to show up with tenderness and courage, standing together to protect what’s most sacred and most at risk.”
