Category Archives: Haibun

Alexis Rotella – USA (PJ30)

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Tequila Moon

This urge
to lie down
in a riverbed

Don’t ask how I got mixed up with this androgynous fifty-something blonde. Maybe I had one too many, but when she proposes we break into the funeral parlor, it sounds like a swell idea. You know, she says, the women the mortician lays out are really dressed over the top. Just so happens, the madam of the local bordello kicked the bucket a day ago and I hear she’s donning baby doll garb and a floppy hat festooned with all kinds of fancy paraphernalia. This guy has a room filled with costumes and his passion is to go all out. He delights in dressing up stiffs, especially the ladies. He decked out his dead mother like she was going to a Mardi Gras parade.

I don’t remember exactly how we broke into the place, but suddenly I find myself standing next to my sidekick as she pulls boas and flowered hats from drawers — cocktail hats with exotic bird feathers, fascinators, those wide-brimmed numbers you see at horse races, bell hats, and cloches. She stuffs whatever she can find into an accordion case.

Like an epiphany, it occurs I might be breaking the law. If caught, I’d be considered an accomplice and there’d go my family’s good name. If this gal is after all this finery, why not just rob a costume shop? How I wish I could convince my good leg to step to the right and pull the other out of this crazy dream.

a black man
entwined in a sousaphone
practices a dirge

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Michael Rehling – USA (PJ30)

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better git it in your soul

people ask me if i believe in reincarnation. I do but only for the living. i cant speak for or to the dead so i will leave that for a later time. a lot later time i sincerely hope. but the living can shape shift many many times in a lifetime you know that in your heart. i wont speak personally about the places i have been reborn into but miles davis did it in his life and his music. he began playing classical music and was considered a born horn player in that world. but then in his teens he moved with all diligent speed toward jazz. yeah the dizzie g phase was a blast but then he just kept moving into bop and invented whole schools of jazz all by himself. then as fast as lightswitch he stopped playing divorced his wife and became a pimp for six years.

leaving the pavement
for the fresh trail
a day shy deer

but when miles came back to the horn again it was as a different person. well you all can guess but many know he changed jazz over and over again with his creative spirit and seemed to find an uneven peace in his life as well after two more marriages. so you see you dont have to be ‘yourself’ all your life. you can be any version of you that appears before you. if your coffee pot is running slow or the coffee does not taste right you toss it out and get a new one. jus like that.

autumn breeze
marking the future flight of butterflies
milkweed seeds

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Terri L. French – USA (PJ30)

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Thanksgiving dinner
Uncle Bud won’t eat
the left wing

feeling strapped
a $50 evergreen
tied to the car roof

Scat

My husband pokes and prods the pile with a stick. “Eww,” I say, wrinkling my nose, “What kinda poo is that?” “Hmm, I dunno,” replies my ever-inquisitive spouse, “definitely not deer…maybe coyote? Looks like he’s been snacking on pistachios.”

off trail
I squat to pee
on my foot

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