ATLAS POETICA A Journal of World Tanka

Number 23

M. Kei, editor toki, editorial assistant

2015 Keibooks, Perryville, Maryland, USA KEIBOOKS P O Box 516 Perryville, Maryland, USA 21903 http://AtlasPoetica.org [email protected]

Atlas Poetica A Journal of World Tanka

Copyright © 2015 by Keibooks

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers and scholars who may quote brief passages. See our EDUCATIONAL USE NOTICE.

Atlas Poetica : A Journal of World Tanka, an organic print and e-journal published at least three times a year. Atlas Poetica is dedicated to publishing and promoting world tanka literature, including tanka, kyoka, gogyoshi, tanka prose, tanka sequences, shaped tanka, sedoka, mondo, cherita, zuihitsu, and other variations and innovations in the field of tanka. We do not publish haiku, except as incidental to a tanka collage or other mixed form work.

Atlas Poetica is interested in all verse of high quality, but our preference is for tanka literature that is authentic to the environment and experience of the poet. While we will consider tanka in the classical Japanese style, our preference is for fresh, forward-looking tanka that engages with the world as it is. We are willing to consider experiments and explorations as well as traditional approaches.

In addition to verse, Atlas Poetica publishes articles, essays, reviews, interviews, letters to the editor, etc., related to tanka literature. Tanka in translation from around the world are welcome in the journal.

Published by Keibooks

ISBN 978-1515332763 (Print)

AtlasPoetica.org TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editorial M. Kei ...... 5, 48, 49 Educational Use Notice ...... 4 Mac Miller ...... 50 Very Short Tanka Prose, M. Kei ...... 5 Margaret Van Every ...... 51 Marianne Paul ...... 52 Poetry Marilyn Humbert ...... 52, 53 Alegria Imperial ...... 7 Marsha Oseas ...... 53 Alexander Jankiewicz ...... 7 Marshall Bood ...... 54 Alexis Rotella ...... 7 Martin Anderson ...... 54 Anna Cates ...... 8 Matsukaze ...... 54, 57 Anne Benjamin ...... 65 Matthew Caretti ...... 58 Autumn Noelle Hall ...... 9, 10 Maxianne Berger ...... 58 Barbara Strang ...... 10 Mike Montreuil ...... 59 Bob Lucky ...... 10, 11, 12 Miriam Sagan ...... 60, 61 Bruce England ...... 12, 13 Natsuko Wilson ...... 59 C. W. Carlson ...... 13 Neal Whitman ...... 61 Carole Johnston ...... 15 Patricia Prime ...... 62, 63, 64, 65, 95, 97 Charles D. Tarlton ...... 15, 16, 17, 87 Peter Fiore ...... 66, 67 Chen-ou Liu ...... 19, 20 Pravat Kumar Padhy ...... 67 Cherie Hunter Day ...... 19 Rebecca Drouilhet ...... 68 Claire Everett ...... 20 Richard St. Clair ...... 68 David J. Kelly ...... 21 Roary Williams ...... 73 Debbie Strange ...... 21 Robyn Cairns ...... 74 Don Miller ...... 22, 23 Ruth Holzer ...... 75 Eusebeia Philos ...... 23 S. M. Abeles ...... 75, 76 Genie Nakano ...... 26, 27 Sandra Renew ...... 76, 77 Geoffrey Winch ...... 24 Sanford Goldstein ...... 77, 78 Gerry Jacobson ...... 25 Sonam Chhoki ...... 78, 79, 80 Goran Gatalica ...... 25 Stephen Galiani ...... 81 Guy Simser ...... 27 Stephen Toft ...... 81 Ignatius Fay ...... 28, 29 Stephanie Brennan ...... 82, 84 Jade Pandora ...... 29 Tim Gardiner ...... 85 Jean Pfeffer ...... 29 Tish Davis ...... 85 Jenny Fraser ...... 29 Traci Siler ...... 86 Jesus Chameleon ...... 30 Tracy Davidson ...... 86 Joan Boonin ...... 30 Vasile Moldovan ...... 86 Joanna Ashwell ...... 30 Joanne Morcom ...... 31 Articles Jonathan Day ...... 31 Notes for a Theory of Tanka Prose: Ekphrasis and Joy McCall 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 57 Abstract Art, Charles D. Tarlton ...... 87 Julie Bloss Kelsey ...... 39 Review: Moonbathing : a journal of women’s Kath Abela Wilson ...... 39, 40 tanka, reviewed by Patricia Prime ...... 95 Larry Kimmel ...... 41, 42 Review: flowers to the torch, American Tanka Liam Wilkinson ...... 43 Prose, by Peter Fiore, reviewed by Patricia Lorne Henry ...... 44 Prime ...... 97 Lynda Monahan ...... 46 Lynn Tara Austin ...... 46 Announcements ...... 100 Educational Use Notice Editorial Biographies

Keibooks of Perryville, Maryland, USA, publisher of the journal, Atlas Poetica : A Journal of M. Kei is the editor of Atlas Poetica and World Tanka, is dedicated to tanka education in editor-in-chief of Take Five : Best Contemporary schools and colleges, at every level. It is our Tanka. He is a tall ship sailor in real life and has intention and our policy to facilitate the use of published nautical novels featuring a gay Atlas Poetica and related materials to the protagonist, Pirates of the Narrow Seas. His most maximum extent feasible by educators at every recent novel is an Asian-themed science fiction/ level of school and university studies. fantasy novel, Fire Dragon. Educators, without individually seeking permission from the publisher, may use Atlas Poetica : A Journal of World Tanka’s online digital toki is a published poet and editorial assistant editions and print editions as primary or ancillary for Keibooks. Born and raised in the Pacific teaching resources. Copyright law “Fair Use” Northwest US, toki often writes poetry informed guidelines and doctrine should be interpreted by the experience of that region: the labyrinthine very liberally with respect to Atlas Poetica precisely confines of the evergreen forests, the infinite on the basis of our explicitly stated intention vastness of the sea and inclement sky, and the herein. This statement may be cited as an liminal spaces in between. toki’s poetry can be effective permission to use Atlas Poetica as a text or found online and in print, with work published in resource for studies. Proper attribution of any Atlas Poetica, The Bamboo Hut, and Poetry Nook. excerpt to Atlas Poetica is required. This statement applies equally to digital resources and print copies of the journal. Individual copyrights of poets, authors, artists, etc., published in Atlas Poetica are their own property and are not meant to be compromised in any way by the journal’s liberal policy on “Fair Use.” Any educator seeking clarification of our policy for a particular use may email the Editor of Atlas Poetica at [email protected]. We welcome innovative uses of our resources for tanka education. Our ‘butterfly’ is actually an Atlas moth Atlas Poetica (Attacus atlas), the largest butterfly/moth in the Keibooks world. It comes from the tropical regions of Asia. P O Box 516 Image from the 1921 Les insectes agricoles d’époque. Perryville, MD 21903

Errata: In ATPO 22 we incorrectly listed the cover image as Floods in Bihar. It was actually Activity at Kizimen Volcano (Russia). We apologize for the error. This raises the question: if prose can be Very Short Tanka Prose poetry, does tanka prose require an element unequivocally formatted as a tanka? Or can This issue of Atlas Poetica focusses on tanka tanka prose exist without any overt tanka? Peter prose, especially short tanka prose, but there are Fiore thinks they can. He offers three short pieces also longer pieces in the issue, as well as pieces of tanka prose sans tanka, each composed of five that challenge the definition of what it means to short prose elements. One of these, ‘Blue Note,’ be ‘tanka prose.’ By having so many examples in might more properly be called ‘kyoka prose’ one place, we can compare them and discover treating as it does a humorous topic. The commonalities and differences, and perhaps be enjambed lines break mid-sentence showing us provoked into trying a little experimentation of that we should not yield to the tyranny of our own. conventional formatting to find the rhythm of the Several poets noted that they had never poem. If that’s so, then there is no need for written tanka prose before, but intrigued by the formatting at all. He delivers just such an request for very short tanka prose, gave it a try. example in ‘Snow Country,’ a single dense block Perhaps very short tanka prose is a gateway to the of text which nonetheless carries within its form for poets and readers alike. If we are internal structure the usual prose + poem comfortable with reading and writing short features of tanka prose. poems like tanka, adding a little bit of prose is a In most of the tanka prose, we find that the gentle way to initiate us into the greater mysteries prose and tanka echo one another, with the prose of prose—prose that can come in intimidating explaining or the tanka summarizing or blocks like novels or textbooks which may not fit providing examples. In Larry Kimmel’s ‘The our busy lives and Internet-shortened attention Wasp Nest,’ that example takes the opportunity spans, and may even been seen as the opposite of to leap into experimental language to convey the poetry. shock of a wasp sting. Kath Abela Wilson leads Yet there are several lengthy tanka prose us through synesthesia into Magritte-like pieces in this issue that command our attention. surrealism with a floating gondola in ‘Together.’ Lynda Monahan’s ‘The Isle of Linga’ is a tanka The experiments continue. Joy McCall and novel just two pages long which introduces us to a Jonathan Day give us a responsive tanka prose central character and follows her through the piece. Ignatius Fay eschews sentences and gives events of her life and her relationships. Charles us a list. Matthew Caretti gives fragments that D. Tarlton’s ‘Re-Setting the Bare-Roots’ form a compact list of their own. The subdivides into a series of numbered vignettes possibilities are endless, and this issue gives a that build like a tanka sequence. The relationship representative sampling of the many ways to among the individual sections is enigmatic, but write tanka prose. like Ouroboros biting its tail, the end brings us to the beginning and completes the sequence. ~K~ The shortest tanka prose pieces by comparison are sketches—a few strokes of ink M. Kei upon a page that suggest more than they tell. Editor, Atlas Poetica Debbie Strange gives us tanka accompanied by a single prose sentence, while Don Miller and Fires along Rio Zingu, Brazil Genie Nakano give us prose pieces that are barely longer. These very short lines of prose Cover Image courtesy of Earth Observatory, NASA. suggest that we approach the prose as a poem and Marilyn Humbert tell us they intend us to read it that way.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 5

Canvas Aunt Mary

Alegria Imperial Alexis Rotella

He makes me wait as he mixes more cyan to Years keeping me the sea. My skin begins to flake under the glare at arm’s length of his eyes. He washes my scars with sea foam, cutting my aunt’s toenails and completes my being. as she reminds me she bathed me as a child fumes from the old moon's sighs Ninety-three years old cloud the skylight . . . how much longer and yet a shooting star can she procrastinate leaves on the trees ~Canada already yellow

Soon she will be living in a home up the road these senior years with health issues of my own Razor Blade How hard we try Alexander Jankiewicz to reach old age then bemoan every ache The early morning phone call before sunrise: as loneliness grows The hole in your stomach when you hear the news even before it’s given, and you know the ~United States anticipation won’t make the cut any less deep. Before getting out of bed, I wonder if I didn’t answer, would the pain just go away. Alexis Rotella is a poet and digital artist who practices acupuncture in Arnold, Maryland.

teardrops Alexander Jankiewicz was born and raised in Chicago, IL,USA and on my way down currently lives in Germany with his wife and two daughters. alone Alegria Imperial, a journalist from Manila for years, began writing the morning dew poetry when she stumbled upon haiku and later other Japanese short of an early morning walk poetry forms. Of them, she feels tanka best mirrors her inner wholeness. Her works have been published in international journals with some ~Germany gaining an award.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 7 Dust to Dust Anna Cates

Anna Cates my cat, Freddie loving it when birds come o frabjous day! Last fall the lawnmower took off a slow callooh! callay! toad’s hind limbs. I buried the unfortunate fellow the little guy’s mine in the tomato patch. This year the tomatoes are fatter. ~United States wind chimes a green tomato’s first blush for the first time in weeks I notice the sunset Silent Spring ~United States Anna Cates

war- no Stranger more war- Anna Cates bling

~United States Driving through Utah, a long lonely highway, I pull into a rest stop. A man asks me, Anna Cates resides in Wilmington, Ohio, with her two cats, Freddie “Do you wear special underwear?” and Christine. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and several other advanced degrees related to English studies, and teaches English online for several universities. She is a regular contributor to short form red rock poetry publications, and her first full length collection of haiku and other tumbleweeds roll poems, “The Meaning of Life,” from Cyberwit.net, is now available at the cloudless sky online retailers. in a dry land Mormon temples Autumn Noelle Hall lives in a cabin in Green Mountain Falls, Colorado, with her husband, two daughters, and one rapscallion ~United States Australian Shepherd. When not feeding birds or photographing the mountains, she writes. A Pikes Peak Arts Council nominee for Page Poet of the Year, Autumn is honored to have her work included in many fine Asian Short Form publications, both at home and abroad. She is especially grateful to you, Readers, for bringing her words to life.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 8 Noah’s Ark Little Jack Horner

Autumn Noelle Hall Autumn Noelle Hall

At two, my perseverant weather girl predicts On the very day I learn from my daughter the storms which lie ahead for us, “DOWN came that her dad won’t cosign for her college loans, I the rain . . . DOWN came the rain . . . DOWN get curious about a constant rattling at the apex came the rain . . . ” of my dining room. My old wooden broom in hand, I give the ceiling a few good knocks. waterspout and all Within seconds, dozens of wasps pour out from the itsy bitsy spider under the eaves to hurl themselves at the lost in the flood . . . windows where I’m standing. decades will pass before we see a rainbow he stuck in his thumb and pulled out a nest—plum-full ~Aurora, Colorado, USA of hornets the poison of my ex still stinging

~Green Mountain Falls, Colorado, USA

Make Someone Happy

Autumn Noelle Hall Hung by the Chimney with Care

Because she’s far from home working so hard to study things I cannot possibly understand— Autumn Noelle Hall because she’s gotten a job, an apartment and adopted a kitten—because on the first day of the Twenty-one now, she calls to tell me she had a new semester, her dad refuses to cosign her revelation. “Those five little monkeys’ mama college loans for her—and because I can’t, I never really called the doctor, did she? She just revert back to preschool and the only thing I can pretended to, so that they would all stop jumping think of right now to make her smile. on the bed!” voice memo slowly closing me doing my very best that gap between my daughter Jimmie Durante and me . . . skidamarink a doo wondering when to admit skidamarink a doo that Santa was a lie ~Green Mountain Falls, Colorado, USA ~Green Mountain Falls, Colorado, USA

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 9 Doubling Back Shopping Anxiety

Autumn Noelle Hall Barbara Strang

The same wind eroding the prairie into those What would she like, really? Something she rainbow spires of rock turns turbines generating hasn’t got already, which doesn’t clutter her life, electricity used to charge the battery powering not big and too expensive but small and casual. the camera I’ve focused on this case of bone. Which I can conjure up from the post-quake possibilities on our side of town. scribbled above an orbital socket searching for sagittal sutures a birthday present the rabbit’s skull not unlike store to store its zigzag life I drive along the avenue past the quiet dead ~Paint Mines Interpretive Park, Colorado, USA ~New Zealand

Barbara Strang lives at Christchurch, New Zealand, struck by a series of earthquakes in 2010-2011. She has had a long-term interest in Japanese forms. Signs of the Times

Autumn Noelle Hall

Be Prepared Another Starry Night To Stop When Bob Lucky Flashing

Taking a walk to cool off, I wish I could get This yellow gem never fails to conjure an my hands on whatever absinthe van Gogh was untoggled Paddington-style slicker with the other drinking. The stars don’t twinkle or swirl tonight. kind of bare underneath. Children At Play begs They’re like pinpricks in a blackout curtain. the question, “Where else would they be?” and the thought, “Hopefully nowhere near the spat flashing!” Zen-like, but true, Icy Conditions May with my wife— Exist. As may free lunches, Mars water, and too old global warming. Please, DOT*, tell us something to volunteer we didn’t know. for the Mars trip

~Manitou Springs, Colorado, USA ~Saudi Arabia *DOT=Department of Transportation

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 10 Mermaids The Candidate

Bob Lucky Bob Lucky

chance of rain I’ve never been in love with a mermaid, I tell my the morning after friend, who’s leaning over the side of the deck a televised debate— and staring into the water like a drunken psychic just another promise who can’t get the crystal ball to come into focus. never fulfilled He thinks he would like to have sex with a mermaid. Just to see. Too much like bestiality to me , I In the waiting room, my mother quietly waits say, maybe a blowjob. I don’t have the heart to tell for her name to be called. There are a few other him mermaids aren’t real. You kno w, he says, patients waiting as well. The sound on the TV is someday something wonderful is going to happen to me. A off. I’m watching a Viagra commercial and glint off the bow catches our eye, but we both imagining the look on that man’s face when he agree it’s probably just a fish. walks awkwardly into the clinic, with his four- hour erection. “Who was that politician,” my the tan lines mother blurts out, “who couldn’t get it up?” of a topless dancer happy hour ~Texas, USA what men talk about when they talk about fishing

~Texas, USA Ethnographic Vignette #1

Jetlag Bob Lucky

Bob Lucky The anthropologists showed the villagers a film of village life and asked them what they saw. They all saw a chicken. The anthropologists were Throughout the night, I listen to the sound amazed, confused. They couldn’t recall seeing a of drawers opening and closing, the creaking of chicken, so they watched the film again and in doors, rattle of cutlery, murmur of television one scene spied a chicken in the bottom right commercials, unzipping and zipping of suitcases. corner, a blur of a chicken, a cameo appearance. At some point, I decide to pretend to be asleep. There are many ways to be human, they My dreams aren’t real. concluded. Some people don’t know how to watch a film. sunlight burning through clouds the fog— moonlit from above her side of the bed overnight flight still made all my dreams silent movies ~Texas, USA ~somewhere over the Red Sea

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 11 Royalty Bruce England

Bob Lucky We don’t It makes no sense. During the French think enough Revolution minor aristocrats fleeing to the north of the dark and into the arms of my Norwegian ancestors, behind milkmaids, peasants. Injecting royal blood into our backs the veins of my family. Settling down to a quiet life of seagull eggs and badly made cheeses. The arguments against that logic are clear, but I’ve Imperceptibly heard the story so often I believe it. That’s the in afternoon light truth. white clouds avalanche down summer visit coastal mountains to Versailles— a little over the top but I could live there As cold and harsh if I had to as winter can be the beat down ~France of insects is a comfort Secret Ingredient The winds Bob Lucky last night worried all When grandma died, I went by her house the trees and picked up a shoebox full of hand-written and roofs recipes before anyone could toss it. I had to have her famous recipe for buttermilk pie. I found it scribbled on the back of an old electric bill. But it I believe never turned out for me. Something was missing. in long, warm She must have done it on purpose. I was starting deep kisses to hate that woman. One day I went to her grave in the morning and gave her the silent treatment, and God too. before rising a bouquet of silken roses One phrase gathers dust— in a furniture ad, even with eyes closed “moments of life among I can’t smell a thing things of beauty,” ~Texas, USA stopped me

Bob Lucky lives in Jubail, Saudi Arabia. He is an editor at Contemporary Haibun Online and a frequent contributor to various journals. He is author of Ethiopian Time, a chapbook of haibun, tanka prose and prose poems.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 12 Slim enough my tanka C. W. Carlson slivers under your fingernails Munich bound Orient Express ~California, USA lurking spies whisper in my ear your deepest secret

Sedoka a cogwheel train belched fire on the grade Bruce England cinders flew a red-headed lady From Springsteen songs, had freckles to match Jon Stewart claims, “I’m not a loser French table wines I’m a character are sampled from demijohns in an epic poem jugs are straw covered about losers” a glassblower with flabby cheeks plays a trumpet at night

You know weathered-face fishermen at some point mend tattered seines you become Portuguese was spoken too round a tavern fado singer sang too ugly of lovers lost at sea too old sheepherders ~California, USA drank wine from botas sheepskin clothes are hardy an old singer had a leathery face Tanka Pear and sang folk songs large catamarans Bruce England tacked just off the point the canvas was taut To get rid A vine her portrait didn’t capture of weeds and insects climbs up the side her loveliness you need to pull of a kiln— the earth into the sun always being burnt back a faint laughter and burn it to a cinder always growing back came from the downstairs bar a tipsy lady was singing ~California, USA my ceiling fan wobbled and made a whining sound Bruce England lives and works in Silicon Valley. His haiku writing began in 1984, and his serious tanka writing in 2010. Other related interests include haiku theory and practice. Long ago, a chapbook, Shorelines, was published with a friend, Tony Mariano.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 13 trees had snapped a sunbeam streams through and storm debris lay about a missing window slat windows were shattered a shadow marks the time a liquor-eyed lady sobbed we got our bearing while staring at the bar mirror with the north star

Edith Piaf sang single red leaf with so much emotion hangs on the oak tree Frenchmen spoke of a little sparrow so lonely pigeons fought for the popcorn fish wait for high tide tossed by the organ grinder to escape the tide pool iron horse 514 dearest stop shone in new black paint dock on Tuesday stop an old timer waved Titanic grandpa was asleep on the porch sending SOS next to a broken glass of lemonade pow . . . er flic . . . er . . . g

June bugs struck cobwebs glowed my camp lantern silver in the doorway bullfrogs croaked the moon poured in sleeping came easy I formed birds on the wall listening to a brook with my hands a brook formed ribbons French beignets shed of smooth glass powdered sugar all over figurines were on display how sweet it is I stared at her form I sent candy and roses becoming spellbound the day after our first kiss native daffodils she sang “Smile” pierced the spring snow which quickly quieted the crowd the snowman was melting loud laughter was the norm she had an enchanting smile I told some great jokes that warmed the chill away that nobody could remember damselflies flew the doc says over the universe I have cancer the lake mirrored the sky chemo starts tomorrow my love letters came back well-wishers brought undying “Return to Sender” imitation flowers high tide ebbs Spanish Gypsies sandpipers dig clams sang Romani folk songs shells appear gypsy moths flew into the fire kids return to the beach we played boules to build sandcastles and danced around the bonfire

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 14 my dog, Red was my best friend (D)r(ea)m(th) such are memories new friends fill our needs Charles D. Tarlton but, not the same as old ones bumblebees Lately I have become more aware of death are laden with pollen and the inevitability of dying. I imagine thoughts a hum resonates in my ear and feelings coming to an end and, like a leaf my foot taps to jazz on impulse that falls from an oak in autumn, what was once and sometimes when nervous quick simply decomposes. I try to imagine the nothing, but it remains impossible to go the flying fish shirr whole way, to feel alive now and form a viable over my lifeboat idea of being dead later. An imaginary someone I was lost is always watching out through my dead eyes. there was no albatross nor land on the horizon the rains have stopped in summer. The San Joaquin ~United States riverbed dries up in a magical moment C W Carlson is a 78 year old retired aerospace engineer. He was when the last water goes by involved in the Apollo/Saturn V program to get people to the moon and back. He is currently living in Olathe, KS. He has been writing poetry for 18 years and has had many published. He recently tried his hand at then there’s the dream me classical 31 syllable tankas and more recently, 21 syllable tankas. roams vaguely familiar streets in some other world he always wakes up, mourning outré landscapes fading away Carole Johnston across the cosmos I press my camera against the window of the a living room just like this empty house, an intruder stealing from the past. looks back at some me Sunlight strikes the dust on my mother’s corner riding on the waves of time china cabinet, and a river of memories streams wondering all the same things through me. That gargoyle woman watching from her porch, guarding the neighborhood; ~Northern California, USA does she remember the child I used to be?

children pick up pebbles carry them in their pockets tiny secrets

~North Brunswick, New Jersey, USA

Carole Johnston lives and writes in Lexington, Kentucky, although she is from Nowhere Zen. Her chapbook, “Journeys: Getting Lost,” can be purchased from online retailers.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 15 Right Moment The Fascination of the Almost Round Charles D. Tarlton Charles D. Tarlton He meant to pluck a moment out of the air like a carrot. That way, he knew the details would She found a pocketful of nearly perfectly be unexpected, the sounds not yet boring, smells round flat stones on the beach at Watch Hill and in the air still unfamiliar, and the whole occasion put them in a painted Japanese bowl beside the new. Take something utterly fresh, he thought to split and faded wooden Buddha with a red and himself, and then anything you can think to say yellow silk lei around its whittled neck. It made a about it will be novel. He closed his mind’s eye sort of shrine and spoke to the gratitude gods and reached out, figuratively. All he could think express when we include them in our business. I of, however, were the words—“a fair suggested maybe we needed a crucifix to round resemblance.” things out or a framed first communion card, but she said, “it’s not about religion, not the way you an unsuspecting mean.” tick-trefoil leaf pirouettes under the first drop shards of sea glass of rain. The afternoon dark in their crystal bottle lamp whoops it up—“More,” it cries, “more!” blue, green, milky white coloring ancient incidents the poetry prof many older than childhood drew slanted blue pencil lines through my diffident words something’s familiar snipping mistimed poesie in an old shilling or the moon loose from its moorings all points equidistant from the one made the center sometimes I can hear whipping your head around a soundless music thumping searching for words each little pebble a tiny breaking of blue glass can turn lightly maybe once my line drawn out by its roots in the sandy swash we pick them up and save them ~Florence, Massachusetts, USA from their unending ordeal

~Watch Hill, Rhode Island, USA

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 16 Re-Setting the Bare-Roots: 3 Tanka Prose Tucked in amidst the traffic speeding on the four-lane, forced to drive too fast, and dodging tractor-trailers that lurch out to take the lane in Charles D. Tarlton front like Rhinos, there is no chance to enjoy the scenery. Thick forests look as if they hadn’t changed since Holocene times, but actually they “And so each venture were under tillage or pasture throughout the 18th Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate . . ..” century and half the 19th. Walk in New England —T. S. Eliot woods and you still discover remnants of old fieldstone walls. 1 as the river twists in its patient search for towns Early morning at Watch Hill, Rhode Island, it hardly misses and already the beach is crowded with red, any from Pittsburg, N.H. yellow, blue, green, and orange towels and through Hartford to the Sound umbrellas. Little children run madly down to the water and then shriek as they rush back to the safety of a mother’s leg. People stand in the 4 swash and look out to sea; what are they looking for? All along the banks of the Connecticut River in Massachusetts, the historic crop was tobacco. the sea won’t come in Fields filled with the unmistakable broad leaves where my words could compel it can still be found here and there, and you see the to stand for something old tobacco barns everywhere, with their narrow else. The wind or the moon move little windows through which the curing winds it this way and that, is all could blow. They are mostly empty now, tobacco being long out of favor, but tourists still stop to take photos with their iPhones. 2 the guys I ran with Once, a dozen four-way intersections marked smoked like chimneys, we posed with red stop signs halted and sorted traffic the way Dick Powell between the Norwich-Salem Turnpike and Route leaned in to the camera 11 in central Connecticut, but now they’ve built the smoke curling round his head two traffic circles where the flow of cars slows, hesitates, decides, and rolls on through. When it really was called the Norwich-Salem Turnpike 5 (in the early 1800s) there were no Dunkin’ Donuts and no Getty Mart and you crossed the We are right now on the cusp; everywhere Connecticut River on a ferry. the hardwood trees are still full and green, although sometimes you see portending strokes of a highway cuts right red or orange on the end of a single branch. You through deep woods where moccasined double check now before planning a trip to the Mohegans and Pequots beach, and when the gardener comes to mow the slipped among the trees, talking lawn each week, well, it doesn’t always need it. to the mosses and the birds

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 17 The summer is receding and there’s a brief of a Florentine master. coolness in the early mornings. I’m not saying snow yet, but the wheel of the seasons is turning. moose tracks in the footing of her indoor arena at different paces dogs ecstatically circling our thoughts racing, the ice slow nipping and barking, made wild winter coming in by scents from the other side she tosses off her garments reaching naked to the skies 8

6 We moved here in December and patches of snow hid the shrubs, flowers beds, and lawns. In Massachusetts, we bought an old Dead canes from last summer stuck up through millworker’s house from the 1880s that had a the snow where it was shallow, mysterious small horse barn behind it. Back then there’d mounds threatened wherever it was deep. My been an unpaved road out front, the house was lit first thought was we’d mow it all flat in the by gas or oil lamps, and the backyard was all in spring, keep it easy to manage, but everyone said vegetable garden. To the side of the house, a wait and see what happens. What happened was little back from the road, stands an ornamental a circus of colors and shapes, a wild changing cast-iron water pump (we found the discarded canvas of roses, zinnias, brown-eyed Susans, remnants behind the barn). There is a teen-age orange and yellow day lilies, and purple salvia. boy pumping water into buckets that he carries The delicate peonies opened out, but were to a trough for the horse. flattened in the first hard rain.

lemon-colored day spring was a climax lilies on the perimeter over before it began where once there’d been white summer’s denouement picket fence out to the road was stopped cold, as autumn air passing cars disrupt the quiet colored the leaves, promising snow

7 9

We were invited to dinner at the house of a We moved back to New England after several local painter, a retired art professor, and years in California and I’m only gradually getting horsewoman. She and her companion live in the used to two things here—deciduous trees and hills above Amherst, Massachusetts, with five water. Wherever you go the woods stretch away horses and as many dogs, two ancient apple trees on both sides of the road up and over hills into sagging under their prodigious crop, and a porch the distance. The Connecticut River and its for watching sunsets. Inside the house it was all tributaries (the White, the Deerfield, Saw Mill, paintings, though, hung on every wall, stacked in Chicopee, and the West Branch of the corners, and packed loosely in cardboard Farmington rivers) twist and turn, drawn back to cartons. Among the many portraits and the sea. The car is always crossing over a bridge landscapes, however, were more than two-dozen or hurrying past a lake or a pond somewhere in a paintings of dressage, the horses and riders forest. Oh, and yes . . . thunderstorms. caught in a magic of movement and light, the shadows cast across a face or a fetlock like those

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 18 a single red leaf an Oak, I think, or a Maple Chen-ou Liu stuck on my windshield in the morning after rain on the barroom wall had worried the trees all night faded Obama poster altered to say Nope . . . 10 accompanied by a Confederate flag Under nearly every large city in the world, archeologists find layers of buried artifacts, ~Buchanan, Georgia, USA instruments, devices, implements, and utensils of an earlier civilization. In the garden behind our new house, we dug up old broken plates and on the way cups, a rusted horseshoe, nails, and fragments of to the place I share barbed wire, blackened by fire. with migrants . . . loneliness covered with steel in a wooden box moving through cornfields of night we found old blue-glass bottles patent cough syrup ~South Huron, Ontario, Canada when the silk-twister’s daughter was sick with influenza

~Florence, Massachusetts, USA (2015) sitting across from my blonde tutor Charles D. Tarlton is a retired university professor who has been with a dimpled smile writing tanka prose and flash fiction since 2006. He lives in I undress English Massachusetts with his wife, Ann Knickerbocker, an abstract painter. layer by layer Cherie Hunter Day has been writing and publishing tanka for twenty-two years and has won national and international awards for ~Toronto, Canada her work. Tanka print publications include: “Kindle of Green” (2008) Platypus Books, a responsive tanka sequence with David Rice. “A Color for Leaving” won the Snapshot Press e-chapbook contest and will be published in 2015. boobs not bombs painted in blood red Undertones on their chests . . . a line of young men busy taking photos Cherie Hunter Day ~Waterloo, Ontario, Canada The shopping consultant says she loves helping customers with makeovers. She tells me to look at the veins in my wrist. Are they greenish cold wind or violet? from passing trailer trucks— mallards the sex worker bide their time while they grow looks at her reflection new feathers in a roadside puddle I collect their hand-me-downs of shimmering indigo ~Toronto, Canada

~Cupertino, California, USA

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 19 The Fault in Love In My Skin

Chen-ou Liu Claire Everett

Pretty much as soon as I crept into adult my blind date sizes, I decided happy was unrealistic. I’d settle for flashes a dimpled smile . . . comfortable. Now I realise here now is as good as it’s blooming viburnum ever going to get. sting the air with their spicy scent through the black leading of midwinter trees after making love a stained glass dawn . . . we fumble the mirror reminds me into our daily outfits . . . I have a tattoo knowing the day longer than the night ~United Kingdom

I say firmly, It’s not you, it’s me . . . the mixed smells of manly lie and whisky truth Crowkind loneliness Claire Everett inside my attic room like barking They say it’s morbid, this fascination with from a street without dogs . . . death, this impulse to pick over the past, to pare flowers blooming in the sky things to the bone. They don’t see that I also have an eye for baubles, but not so much to take, as to my gay friend give; if someone pays me heed, or offers me a sends a water-stained copy crust of kindness, I’ll bring treasures to their of Moby Dick doorstep, but only the most discerning will take to his ex-partner the pebble to their altar, or burn the frond as who’s going to tie the knot incense. Rare are they who cosset a limping fledgling, quieting her gape with titbits gripped ~Ajax, Ontario, Canada by chopsticks. And rarer still, the one who years later, knows her for her cinder wings, her rasp of greeting. Chen-ou Liu lives in Ajax, Ontario, Canada. He is the author of five books, including Following the Moon to the Maple Land (First Prize, for fifty years 2011 Haiku Pix Chapbook Contest) and A Life in Transition and Translation (Honorable Mention, 2014 Turtle Light Press Biennial their caws have awakened me Haiku Chapbook Competition). His tanka and haiku have been you’re alive! honored with many awards. whose else but their footprints Claire Everett is the founding editor of Skylark tanka journal and around my eyes tanka prose editor for Haibun Today. She lives in North Yorkshire, England, with her husband and five children who are fledging, one by ~United Kingdom one.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 20 burnt out Encrypted

David J. Kelly Debbie Strange

At the shopping mall entrance, a painfully Somehow, it seems that I am always the last thin woman is smoking, nurturing a pale cylinder to know . . . in stained fingers. Nothing else seems to matter. She pinches her features tighter, with another a crow scrawls deep breath; releasing smoke in a long, slow asemic messages stream. The exhaust thickens in sharp winter air, between clouds providing a brief diversion. Then her focus I could never read draws in once more and she wraps herself the writing on your walls around the cigarette. ~Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada flickering candle struggling all the harder as a breeze murmurs morning’s mist clears slowly in watery autumn light ~Ireland Weapons of Mass Destruction David J. Kelly lives and works in Dublin, Ireland, where he finds scientific and artistic inspiration in the natural world. He has had a variety of Japanese short form poetry published in numerous journals. Debbie Strange

I was incredibly naive to think that you would be my only enemy . . .

how deadly Nearly There these red lily beetles in my garden Debbie Strange after a swift attack only fallen soldiers

~Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada I told them I was dead, but not a single person there believed me . . . Debbie Strange (Winnipeg, Canada) is a member of the Writers’ the sign said Collective of Manitoba and is also affiliated with several haiku and turn back, road ends here tanka organizations. Her writing has received awards, and has been I waken translated, anthologized and published internationally. Debbie is an avid photographer, with a passion for creating tanka art. Her first short from a brief sojourn form collection, Warp and Weft, Tanka Threads, is available through in another realm Keibooks. You are invited to visit her on Twitter @Debbie_Strange and at debbiemstrange.blogspot.ca/ ~Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 21 Near at Hand All Natural Farming

Don Miller Don Miller

I want to learn in sojourn natural farming to visit the tanka master she says I follow all they having me doing the meandering trail is pulling weeds up a hill so much kale and red-leaf lettuce closer with each step but even more weeds yet further away to pull unable to see at the all natural farm the poem for the lines another lesson four hours of weed pulling sweeping and nothing more each leaf-littered step on the all natural farm as I climb arranging a new set learning of five lines which leaves to pull at the all natural farm her salad bowl it has taken overflows this long For Raquel to reach ~Taos, New Mexico, USA the last step covered in snow reversing Troubled Water my steps I search Don Miller for a shovel They operated on the seventh day. Seven days after that . . . ~Purgatory, Colorado, USA

For Sanford Goldstein. Inspired by the cover of his book Four Decades at the airport on My Tanka Road, as well as reading his sequence At the Hut of the returning Small Mind. from the clinic the first time, he said I saw you hold her hand

~El Paso, Texas, USA

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 22 Don Miller Death

Eusebeia Philos no celebration of this koki milestone still an email invitation the solemn reflections includes a list in Hiroshima of deceased classmates— i also will not attend ~Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA our 40-year reunion *koki is a Japanese term for reaching or turning 70 sitting in cemetery grass it’s in the stars among the dead, so it must be true a skyline of tombstones this melancholy mood are wishful epitaphs passing through for someone else the Lion’s Gate

~Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA perhaps the dead look back searching for a minute of life they left behind One in Particular angry mountain rocks Don Miller in the heights descend en masse, I thought about Grandma’s house today so I such a pleasant valley below drove by the place she pretty much lived in for as to live and die long as I remember the chicken coop persimmon tree and the orchard, but there was. . . . ~United States

one memory in particular Eusebeia Philos was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. Many of his of climbing the apple tree long form poems are at eusebeiaphilos.blogspot.com. He can also be now found sharing micropoetry on Twitter @Eusebeia_Philos. Grandma’s orchard a 3-story walk-up

~Frankfort, Indiana, USA

Don Miller lives in southern New Mexico, USA. He has been writing tanka since the early 1980s when he learned about the poetic form while attending Purdue University. Don has had his tanka, tanka prose, haiku, haibun and other poems published in various print and online journals over the past decade or so.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 23 Unpolished Raoul Wallenberg (1912-?)*

Geoffrey Winch Gerry Jacobson

Bright schoolboy who just fooled around; guitarist who gave up when Jimi came along; in Nybro Plan not-quite-a-Christian because he could never be beside the stream certain about miracles: where cyclists pass without a glance never revealing I’ve found him his full spectrum never certain whether he might be his signature diamond or paste cast in shining bronze is lit up ~United Kingdom by the rising sun— Raoul Wallenberg

bundles of rags Against the flow in nameless graves their spirits Geoffrey Winch struggling towards those clear cold waters The new culvert is nearly complete. I stand for a while watching machines giving final shape to the channel along which our local river will a hundred soon be diverted. When I’ve seen enough I and twenty thousand continue my walk, and have come to my passports signed— favourite spot, here, on the old river’s bank. I those marked for death watch the water washing over the bright pebble are saved for life, L’Chayyim bed:

on the surface his own death green weed rippling a question mark with the flow this noblest Swede water caressing that ever lived a stationary trout below left rotting in some gulag

~United Kingdom *Kirsten Urtwed, Homage á Raoul Wallenberg, bronze, Stockholm.

Geoffrey Winch is a retired highway engineer living in West Sussex, ~Stockholm, Sweden UK. His poetry has been published widely in the UK, US and online. His fourth collection, Alchemy of Vision (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2014) focuses on the arts. In addition to his freeform poetry, it also contains many of his tanka and tanka sequences, and haiku etc. first published in journals such as Atlas Poetica; Fire Pearls 2; Modern English Tanka; Ribbons, and Blithe Spirit.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 24 Through the Smog Goran Gatalica

Gerry Jacobson Goran Gatalica, English-Croatian Translator / englesko-hrvatski The huge bird, wingswept, lands in this teeming city. Monsoon clouds at dusk. Tall prevoditelj buildings in grey smog. A few lights come on. Circling. Water in the padi fields. Moving lights on the freeway. Sway and rumble as bird glides in putovanje to land. The city towers are phallic. A hundred guta duh punog mjeseca penises point upward through the smog. kroz svemir ova noć je besana tišina past midnight određena u sredini in a sultry motel room the journey naked swallows spirit of a full moon under the sheet through universe reaching out . . . finding . . . you this night is dreamless silence ~Bangkok, Thailand determined in the middle kristalna noć blješte osamljene zvijezde Reincarnated bez oblaka duh lunarne godine Gerry Jacobson po treći puta kuša moju želju crystal night Some moments that I want to go on forever. glittering lonely stars Karlaplan, outside the mall. Sunlight on her without clouds golden hair. She gossips with her mum in the spirit of the lunar year Swedish. Occasionally addresses a remark to me third time now tasting my wish in Toddler-English. Sip coffee, nibble kanelbulle (cinnamon bun). The smoothie runs down her Zviježđe Raka face. I reach across with a tissue. blješti u zodijaku “Farfar!” (Father’s father), she smiles at me. How jastogov rep come I’m reincarnated as grandad to a viking moje oči na tisuću zvijezda princess? nevidljiv mu sjaj nikada ne blijedi

early morning Cancer of northern summer— glittering in the zodiac the sun rises a lobster tail on a world to come my eyes upon thousand stars Emilia giggles their invisible shine never faded

~Stockholm, Sweden dah gravitacije nakon kasnoga pada mjesečine Gerry Jacobson lives in Canberra, Australia. He writes tanka in the u crnu rupu cafes of Sydney and Stockholm, where his grandchildren live. A geologist in a past life, his recent chapbook ‘Dancing with Another Me’ milijuni novorođeneih zvijezda celebrates his resurrection as a dancer. dišu u maglici

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 25 gravity breath after late moonlight falling Snowflakes into a black hole millions of newborn stars Genie Nakano breathing in the nebula It was the 70’s. Everyone was doing it. pao meteorit Cocaine, marijuana, meth, heroin and the pjesma moga djetinjstva psychedelics, all for the taking. So Gloria took it. unutar teleskopa Just once, well maybe more than once. It was utisnuta u staroj knjizi Don, her husband, Cousin Duane and little s mirisom svemira Professor Derick who liked the taste of snow. Gloria couldn’t really understand all this fuss the fallen meteorite about coke. She got the same high running song of my childhood around the block or dancing. And the stuff was inside telescope too expensive. However, acid . . . the psychedelics imprinted into the old book offered something different . . . a new experience with fragrance of universe and at a reasonable price. But no one had time to trip. Seems everyone just wanted to run around Newtonova mehanika on speed and cocaine. most između atoma i svemira Don and Gloria’s house was always full . . . ukroćen duhom people dropping by, conversations, getting high. preko nestale stranice donosim maleni mir nade people, traffic all hours of the night the Newtonian mechanics party, tootin’ bridge between atoms and space Gloria finds a homeless cat tamed by spirit he cries and needs a home across a vanished page I bring tiny peace of hope A new vitamin / herb company “Nature Sunshine” was starting up. Gloria got hooked ~Zagreb, Croatia into “Nature Sunshine”. She became their number one seller.

Goran Gatalica (Virovitica, Croatia, 1982) graduated physics and can’t poop—take psyllium, chemistry at the Faculty of Science in Zagreb, after which he entered the menstrual cramps—black cohosh, doctoral study of atomic and molecular physics with astrophysics. He publishes poetry, haiku and prose in literary magazines, journals and can’t sleep—valerian root anthologies He won several awards for poetry and haiku in Croatia and the golden light of sunshine abroad. He is member of the Croatian Writers’ Association. will heal you naturally Genie Nakano, has a Masters in Dance from UCLA, a 7 time recipient of the California Arts Council Award, poet/columnist for She was fanatical about “Nature Sunshine,” Rafu Shimpo and Gardena Valley News. Author of Enter the Stream, invited people to the “Nature Sunshine” meetings (haibun) and Storyteller (tanka). She currently teaches Bollywood Dancing, Gentle Yoga, and Tanka at the Japanese Cultural Center in and tried to get everyone on board. The “Bodhi Gardena, CA. Tree Bookstore,” was her second home. Nonstop reading, Edgar Cayce’s book Garden of Eden, Guy Simser began his writing with a stylus pen and school desk inkwell books on herbs, natural remedies, reincarnation and ten years later thought the ball point pen was futuristic. Today he marvels that his lyric & Japanese form poems have been published in and lucid dreams. She tooted anything “natural”. eight countries. She was actually annoying.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 26 Things started getting scary. Cousin Duane went around wearing a huge silver cross on his Spoken Words neck. He swore he saw the devil and the cross kept the devil away. That’s about the time his Genie Nakano beautiful wife and two children left him. Dr. Derick, the professor who knew everything, My lover and I are having a lazy Sunday in didn’t know he couldn’t control his habit and one bed. He is reading the times and I am reading night—couldn’t stop. “The Ink Dark Moon,” when he casually takes Gloria kicked Don, her husband out. He had the book from my hand and reads all the love another woman anyway. But sadly he was poems of “The Ink Dark Moon” out loud. hooked; and soon lost the woman, his teeth, and We sigh and pause when the words bear too lives on the streets. much. Sunlight into twilight . . . fast turns, wrong turns deep into what choices do we make the labyrinth of my being the snow urging on my cries falling on the path this moment slippery, deadly more and more

Gloria didn’t get hooked not even on ~California, USA “Nature Sunshine”. Currently, she’s a Bollywood Dance, meditation and yoga instructor; and dancing her heart out to Bollywood music . . . Jai Ho. Another November ~Los Angeles, California, USA Guy Simser

It’s a long distance from where I live now but Paris in the Spring I had to get back just one more time, had to. Bundled in an old heavy wool sweater and with breath short, I search for the remembered mystic Genie Nakano song of our Northern Shield lake, yet how the dank dusk smothers me, its air wet, heavy, a grey horse blanket pressing down. Yes, it was here on Yes, it is all my idea. Yes, he agrees to go. He this shoreline, it was here a wood cabin’s dock asks me to make flight and hotel arrangements. grew up, hand built. All gone now: nothing but Yes, and so—I do. that pride in the feel of once calloused hands and this tattered green-black dock plank, submerged He coughs and yawns. in gloomy water, lonely and calling for help . . .

Spring in Paris dimly on a granite park bench seventy years ago I say it’s over dockside art he is not surprised a sluggish smallmouth bass together we sigh in relief etching glaze ice

~Paris, France ~Loon Lake, Ontario, Canada

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 27 Crippled War Path

Ignatius Fay Ignatius Fay

Feelings of guilt incapacitate her. Guilt for: Gentle and soft-spoken, this delicate North American native flower does everything with a —letting herself be abused by her mother’s quiet grace. boyfriend —being attractive and outgoing three weeks —moving out at 17 to live with a guy no experience —having two children before marrying him at fifteen —submitting to his control already one of the best —wanting some independence, a life of her own employees I have —leaving him in search of herself —being fearful on her own and going back Three of my most frequent customers come —being comfortable with the lifestyle in together. Courage in numbers. A bit of beating —letting him dominate and control her around the bush, then one blurts a demand that I —wanting out of the relationship fire the native girl. I am reminded Indians are —not having sex with him for eight months untrustworthy, lazy, alcoholic, promiscuous and —leaving again dirty. —being afraid of being on her own —being afraid of being alone One of them, whose daughter also applied —being lonely for the job, lays it out for me. —wanting her legal rights in the separation —not demanding her legal rights ultimatum —not knowing how to make a decision fire the dirty redskin —decisions criticized by her friends or else —always letting people ‘guilt’ her into decisions you’ll never see us —caring too much what others think of her in here again —hating her job and being afraid to quit —telling her boss she’s leaving She’s not going anywhere. I run into them —being unable to manage money around town quite regularly, but they never come —not having a nice place where her kids can stay back into the restaurant. over —feeling guilty for everything ~Canada —not doing something about her guilt —again considering going back Ignatius, a disabled invertebrate paleontologist, writes haiku, tanka, haibun and tanka prose. His poems have appeared in many respected online/print journals. His latest collection of poems, Breccia (2012), this time is a collaboration with Irene Golas. He is the current editor of the surprisingly calm Haiku Society of America Bulletin. Ignatius resides in Sudbury, after the storm Ontario. suitcase-shaped dents in new snow

~Canada

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 28 Local Samaritan Passing

Ignatius Fay Jade Pandora

February, seven in the morning, minus twenty Distant and out to sea, the loneliest sound Celsius, still dark. He is in the parking lot of the I’ve ever heard—the call of gulls—drifts on the apartment building. gray of early morning. As if in a dream, I walk the dunes, between foam-kissed shorelines and brushing snow misted hillocks covered with swaying sea grass from neighbors’ cars grown tall, that leans away as the breath of the old samaritan incoming waves approaches, and fades back as smiling his mouthful they exhale. of no teeth Dark hair in my eyes, I look up the wandering coast and make out the figure of a He doesn’t drive. When the neighbors leave young woman who is also walking, barefoot and for work, if he is still there, he chats with them solo, while the onshore breezes push the straw cheerily, no matter how cold. He doesn’t get hair from her brow, her pale eyes peering with paid, expressions of gratitude are not necessary, interest as we draw near, her mouth softening and he alone decides whose vehicles he will with acceptance. Then, passing each other, we clean. both keep turning every few steps to watch the other walking further away. The sand starts to ~Canada swallow my feet as I slowly make my way toward the shallows. Jean Pfeffer lives in rural New Jersey where she is inspired to write poetry and fiction. bending at tide pool’s Jade Pandora resides in California, and was the 2010 recipient edge, the crabs startle and freeze of the Matthew Rocca Poetry Award, Deakin University, Melbourne, as I peer into Australia. She has studied and written Japanese short form poetry since the grave of her barnacle 2007. A published poet, Jade can be found online at deviantART. slumbering, knowing somehow Jenny Fraser lives beside the Waikato River in Hamilton, Waikato, New Zealand. Nature lover, musician and creative artist, she's been ~coastal California, USA writing poetry since her Paris days of the 1970s. Now she’s also finding inspiration through the journey of haiku and tanka. Her work is published in New Zealand and in international journals.

Morning Swim Jenny Fraser meeting Jean Pfeffer your family today brings swimming in the pool more of you a frog races next to me to embrace tonight and when he mimics my stroke I switch to freestyle ~New Zealand and leave him in my wake

~United States

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 29 Jesus Chameleon Joanna Ashwell oozing of blood come to me in a Spring garden alone like you promised fate awaits across the sea final plans beneath the moon through darkness for redirection I wait for your return

just like us stations and statues taking chances shrouded in purple garments starlings unwrapped once again falling deeper weathered nicely in the heat into cloud like us in the pews below leaning together dove tails by the rocks their heart shape in the light’s interstices in the evening glow faithfully impressed; our way ahead might betrayal not have been, might all have been sheep? within rainfall the constant shift ~The Mariana Islands, USA of you and I anchorless and searching for a piece of blue sky Jesus Chameleon is the pen name of a moral thinker who is both a poet and an essayist. As poet and haijin his main muse centers around the ~United Kingdom didactic uses of literature to impart some sort of moral message. A fledgeling website may be found at Home - Jesus Chameleon. Joanna Ashwell, from County Durham, North East of England, member of the British Haiku Society, haiku collection published by Hub Editions—Between Moonlight; published in Presence, Blithe Spirit, Haibun Online, Heron’s Nest, Moonbathing and others. Joan Boonin Joanne Morcom is a writer and social worker living in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. our aging schnauzer all curled up in her dog bed used to wait for us Jonathan Day was born in Austria, and toured the continental United States widely as an army brat, before settling with his family in listened for the garage door Juneau, Alaska, at age six. He sees Alaska as the best possible place to now she doesn’t know we’re home. grow up. He came to Oregon in 1972, and has lived there ever since, working as janitor, short-order cook, welder, furniture factory hand, ~United States baker, dishwasher, life-drawing model, chicken-shit shoveler, construction worker, electrical engineer, solid-state physicist, and other jobs better left for conversation over beer. Always, always, he has drawn Joan Boonin is a Speech-Language Pathologist whose primary and painted. He lives now in the wilds of Oregon, and earns his living professional interest has been acquired language impairment in adults. as artist and maker of fine hand-made books. He has recently taken up She very much enjoys reading, studying and writing poetry and has used the writing of tanka, under the gracious tutelage of Joy McCall. poetry-writing as a therapeutic activity with her patients. Joan has had several poems published in Eclipse and Pearl Magazines. She lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 30 Feathers Jonathan Day

Joanne Morcom anything that is finite Going for a walk on a cool, autumn day, I divided notice a magpie lying in the street. Other by infinity magpies have gathered nearby, as if trying to is always . . . zero decide what to do next—leave it alone, drag it to ~Oregon, USA the curb or take turns pecking at it. A gust of wind ruffles the dead bird's feathers.

raking leaves all by myself I envy geese who fly south by the thousands

~Canada a letter to the doctor, marked PERSONAL

Joy McCall Ozymandias

Joy McCall & Jonathan Day Dear Doctor, I understand It is chilly and raining when I wake in the you would like to see me night. I lie still for a while, waiting. For a time all about my blood tests. I hear is the wind and the odd passing car. My I would like to see you too. eyes close; then comes a low voice, reciting Shelley, and Tennyson; and into the dark, I whisper: sunset and evening star . . . I am free any time, but I understand And the voice answers: you are not free at all. Do you have a suggestion as to how there are stars we might overcome the problem? I see them through the trees I hear crickets singing songs I would not like as countless as the stars to go on disappointing you. and I drift back to sleep, and dream of Yours faithfully, Shelley and Tennyson and Keats walking Joy through a long valley, composing serious poems, while all around them, crickets sing in the dark ~Norfolk, England trees, the sky fills with stars, and Ozymandias still lies there, broken on the sand. Inspired by Tim Lenton

~Norwich, England / Oregon, USA

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 31 not enough waiting

Joy McCall Joy McCall there are times there is food when the swish and wine and laughter of the snakes in the garden through the grass many voices singing in not enough and the half-moon low in the sky there are times the young when the steady stream and not-so-young men of black ants play football up the wall the waiter sits and waits is not enough reading poetry there are times he has dark eyes when the heady smell he says his soul is dark of privet like his black hair when I pass the hedge he writes poems about is not enough the hopelessness of love there are times the guests when even the night sky return to the tables filled with stars there is cake and a waxing moon and coffee and more wine is not enough and gentler music these are times the young waiter brings when I don’t know a haiku on the back of the bill . . . what is enough I could not join or where to find it with the happy crowd; my heart or how to call it to me does not know how to sing

~Norwich, England I sit hearing the snake watching the ants waiting for the stars, wanting the moon in my hands

~Norwich, England

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 32 the stalks hexagram 44 * have told their tale they lie still Joy McCall while the dark desires rise up, crazy in the wind gathering the thin stalks * I Ching—kou—the wind below, the heavens above at the edges of the field I held them, bunched ~Norwich, England on the ground, and let them go and sat, counting, musing . . . ah, the dark wind begins to blow circling below the heavens unsettling the clouds it blows night hours spinning under the stars making their lights spark and fly Joy McCall it pulls at the moon below the trees midnight there is desire and the witches while the wind cries are dancing in the treetops, its voice treading the circle rising and falling the woodhenge it is not wise one a.m. this fierce longing the dance goes on this aching the fire is lit to fly, to spin, to whirl the heavy air like the dervishes smells of leaf and bark the wind two a.m. below the heavens women’s voices singing picks up speed chanting it is wild, and like love the sombre rune will not sit, quietly on the hill the sweet blessing

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 33 three a.m. distant church clock spotlight tolls the hour the old one is reading Joy McCall let the smoke bring dreams for Gerry Jacobson four a.m. for him the fire dies down all the world there is peace is a stage a faint daylight and he stands over the circled field in the shining spotlight

five a.m. bare feet the witches raise on the bare floor their hands to the sun dancing slow the old one calls to cellos playing the dawn invocation the holy benedictus

he reads six a.m. the sailor’s poems * there is traffic passing his voice on the road rising and falling the ashes of the fire like those tides drift, cold, over the grass * M. Kei “January” it’s a long time seven a.m. since first he left arm in arm down the road these English shores to the Inn a boy, escaping half pints of honey mead graveyards of Jewish bones white-sheeted beds once again the church bell he waves goodbye rings eight times and leaves behind across the river the cobbled streets, stained the landlord sweeps the floor with the blood of his ancestors . . . the old witch is snoring keep dancing ~Arminghall Henge, Norfolk, England in that limelight, Gerry keep singing all the world’s a stage don’t forget your lines

~Norwich, England

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 34 scraps Sergio

Joy McCall Joy McCall midnight his name is Sergio poems taking shape he is twenty-nine in the dark no one knows twisting and turning how he came to be living finding their way in the underpass

I breathe a tattoo on his hand quietly, waiting reads brivibas-cinitajs giving them space —freedom fighter— they will not settle he speaks halting English until they are ready when he speaks at all overcome mostly, by sleep, I let them go it is to ask for a smoke until morning or a drink I dream of beetles or money for food: black and beautiful some pennies, please? when I wake he sleeps I write with a dark pencil as the shoppers on paper scraps come and go lines more like thin roots only waking if someone than proper poems brings bread or ale it is hopeless they found him I drop the scraps dead today, slumped in the woods against the wall the termites gather ruptured spleen sawing, shredding, chewing the coroner wrote

“Termites may produce up to two litres of hydrogen from digesting a single sheet of paper, making them one of the planet’s most efficient the body will lie bioreactors.”—Wikipedia for the allotted time ~Norwich, England in the freezer then be burned to ashes . . . ardievas, Sergio *

* goodbye

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 35 and the day window I sat in the chair looking out Joy McCall of the window that I could call window why do I now remember watching the sky the octopus, and the clouds the six-legged tube and smiling in my neck vein? and saying to myself life, bring it on suddenly ~Norwich, England my mind throws up images— Next Page: * In Ray Bradbury’s 1952 short story ‘the Sound of the triumph Thunder’, reality was a fabric so delicate that the crushing of a butterfly could ripple up through 65 million years to change the course of of sitting up history. the first time I held a cup got it to my mouth and drank Joy McCall the times The ancient native shaman is beating the a sock in my hand drum with his hand. Slowly, rhythmically. I looked at my foot He is sitting with his back against a cedar tree so far away in the sunshine. and no way to get there He closes his eyes. An hour passes, then another. He goes on drumming, trancing. I grow restless, and stand up for a while, the words stretching. that began to appear The moon has risen by the time he stops saying window drumming, opens his eyes and looks at me. and not bus stop He smiles. Just as I thought, he says. when I meant window an old doe startled by footsteps being lifted runs deeper into a chair into the dark wood fainting her eyes wild again and again put back to bed The shaman says my spirit is deer. He is right.

~Norwich, England

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 36 The Sound of Thunder home

Joy McCall Joy McCall

I have read this short story* so many times, my mind trying to make sense of it. oh, ask yourself what land calls to you some humans what people have travelled sing in your soul, back in time where is home? seeking the dinosaurs in the jungles of earth how easy it is to go wandering there is one rule roaming they must stay on the path over the hills and so they do and far away for these are men programmed to obey still, even there, one man is looking we turn back up to the skies hearing the voices careless of our ancestors his foot slips for a moment on the warm wind from the solid track

so I came again no one to this peasant land has noticed, the group this common place walk on yet still I hear board the machine the songs of other lands— and go back home the earth Frost called me they left behind and I went to his Amherst is desolate but I too the lands in ruins had promises to keep polluted seas and miles to go before I sleep the man I heard the voice lies sobbing of Service in the pines on the spoiled ground and I went there too on the sole of one shoe, and settled a while a beautiful, dead butterfly under northern lights ~Norwich, England

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 37 Ryokan called from the mountain hut Joy McCall where the bamboo grows where the deer bellow I sleep badly but it was too far to go these hot summer nights so short the Sami drew me so soon broken to Scandinavia by the bright day, beginning and I went but did not stay, my head wakeful too full of other tongues I watch the clock so slow, so slow the Welsh Valleys the minutes pass at night oh how they called the way the hours do in daylight in lilting singsong voices and I rode my horse drying catkins across those dark sands falling on the ground from the chestnut— so many voices the Dutch ketteken calling, tugging at my heart a kitten’s tail in the end it was the land of my birth two small birds that called the sweetest hopping on the wild thyme picking at seeds and the other voices companionable faded away, from hills peaceful, quiet and valleys from oceans, from forests the hazels and wide open lands growing by the roadside in such poor soil and that one the branches stunted quiet voice remained to feed the fat nuts sighing across the flatlands, weeping, singing the room fills the common voice, my own with Sailing, played loud hard rain is falling ~Norwich, England the old oar, boatless Joy McCall is a nurse/counsellor, retired because of paraplegia hanging from the beam following a motorcycle crash. She has written all kinds of poetry for 50 years, publishing occasionally here and there. She lives on the edge of the in the rockpool old walled city of Norwich, England, having spent much of her life in the small fish circles Canada. She treasures most her loved ones, nature, books, words and tattoos, life, and poetry. Keibooks published her ‘circling smoke, scattered through the weeds bones’, ‘hedgerows’ and ‘rising mist, fieldstones’. She thanks M. Kei for the crab sidles over his constant support. sideways, looking askance

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 38 picking herbs for the tea kettle How We Made It my fingers my skin, my breath Kath Abela Wilson smell of oregano Our friend Tom gave us a glorious fish. green froglets Metallic fins, purple eyes, pink and white striped come out in the rain tail, and green polka dots on an orange body. from under the rocks Plump and vigorous he floated near the ceiling. I the young magpies watched him from the lounge chair where I slept, hungry, also come down and my husband from the hospital bed, both of us smiling till we fell asleep. We both felt the slow a small spider sway, the gentle breeze of the fish in the night, his night-spinning her web helium swirls lower and lower till it was time to between thorns . . . have him refilled. Tom tried, but really, we were I find peace in the patterns on our way out. Such a great companion for the of leaf veins and galaxies recovery after Rick’s crazy accident. for Kei ~Norwich, England over our condo door still floating a flying fish to remind us of how we made it over the falls

~California, USA Julie Bloss Kelsey Together I never intended to own a pet rat. We already have a dog and a tank of fish. But my son Kath Abela Wilson insisted on this tiny furry creature with a shudder-inducing, naked pink tail. Miniature I came to your home to visit. I brought my paws grasp the bars of his cage door in greeting stack of journals, pages marked with fragments of each morning. When I say hi, the rat cocks his a long poem that felt about to happen. A head and politely waits for me to continue weekend of music. I sat in a soft corner and speaking. I notice when he falls ill. collected my wits. It happened that the pieces came together. Sentences, phrases, words eyedropper in hand glimmered on lit pages and I strung them I squirt medicine together like jewelry, a necklace I had ordered, of into the rat’s mouth my own work. I spread my colors out on your below his cage table and you smiled and watched how they all the dog licks her lips mixed together. we built skylights ~United States and sliding doors took down walls When she isn’t chasing her children or a flurry of pets, Julie a gondola Bloss Kelsey writes haiku, tanka, and other short poems from her home sailed through with me and you in Germantown, Maryland. Find her on Twitter (@MamaJoules). on a honeymoon

~California, USA

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 39 Side by Side Gently

Kath Abela Wilson Katha Abela Wilson

They were both over ninety. They took turns The beautifully carved headboard of an looking at one another with concern, never both ancient bed showed this message: “Life is But a at the same time. Serena was five months older. Dream.” In the dream it seemed natural. I woke She liked to tell Maria what to do. They were up smiling. side by side in the dining room listening to old time songs. The group clapped and “chair in the wake of a duck danced”. Maria jiggled her chair. “Stop it” said another duck Serena. Maria pinched and glared. All evening reflections Serena collected her own tears, like petals, in her while you and I stream by cooling tea, and slept late in the morning. merrily

the necklace ~California, USA she gave me made of magnets the shape our hands make when we’re holding never comes out even ~California, USA Her Way

Kath Abela Wilson In the Lobby Her first born was a girl. She dressed her for Kath Abela Wilson Halloween as an Egyptian princess. When she turned on the music in the family room her eyes lit with sincerity and allure. All I could do was Approaching a hundred, in their imitate and sway. wheelchairs, side by side they hold hands over the space between wheels. The angles of their small fingers footrests match. They never say a word. They move to Arabian rhythms look ahead with the same expression, eyebrows she taught me raised. snake arms baby bellydance to charm them opening the door just about to leave in my flowery hat ~California, USA I look back with her free hand Kath Abela Wilson, of Pasadena, CA, is secretary of the Tanka she gives me thumbs up Society of America and leader of Tanka Poets on Site. She is currently busy with Tanka Sunday 2015 in Albany, New York, and helping her ~Pasadena and Santa Barbara, California, USA 94 year old mother through the rigors of assisted living in Santa Barbara.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 40 Larry Kimmel Larry Kimmel

Hope Street, Shelburne, MA across the aisle dark-browed, purple-eyed there’s snow coming petite & pretty— you can smell it in the air a tiny tempest see it in the sky— about to happen all the sad-eyed houses along Hope Street wait prancing home so bright in an aura of manure, against the winter sky, the dog the tattered yellow announces of maples along Hope Street spring —my sad love for this unforgiving world

ragweed & a car on blocks— Never Alone the old dog moseys out dawn comes to say hello with its egg yolk insistence mourning doves & duty . . . the monologue kicks in they’re back— —never alone those big fat flies that wouldn’t this endless monologue, let my unrecorded long-song . . . you read I might be talking to you, and you? you can’t get a word in edgewise butterflies without wings— would we still Can’t an Honest Citizen love them? track lights caught in the café window seem to float above the street— night UFOs come to mind of gale force winds— and off I go to other worlds stoned I cross the trestle can’t an honest citizen on hands and knees space out at the café window without a passer-by stopping to stare in?

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 41 stargazing— I know Party Line how stop-signs get Larry Kimmel peppered

In those days, we’d a party line four miles old men long, the length of Soap Hollow. 3 longs 3 shorts rake leaves, —our ring out of 25. To sleep when working the winter it out night shift, the men stuffed the bells with paper. in narrow beds coal and steel and the grit that goes with them— counting syllables dandelion by night was not a delicacy pennies by day ~Colrain, Massachusetts, USA —the arithmetic of verse

~Colrain, Massachusetts, USA

The Wasp Nest

Navel Orange Larry Kimmel Larry Kimmel Fifteen minutes after having taken a broom to the wasp nest, he opened the window to check. Called back, the paper boy turns, expecting zing-zing—like that, they were waiting. the worst, for she is a daunting old lady, but today—a navel orange for Christmas. neurotransmitter synapse impulse ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ “ouch” “ouch” somewhere between Dickens ~Colrain, Massachusetts, USA and Pynchon the Rockwell days of my dad Larry Kimmel is a US poet. He holds degrees from Oberlin Conservatory and Pittsburgh University, and has worked at everything from steel mills to libraries. Recent books are “this hunger, tissue-thin,” ~Colrain, Massachusetts, USA and “shards and dust.” He lives with his wife in the hills of Western Massachusetts.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 42 the rooms spring

Liam Wilkinson Liam Wilkinson lighting a candle lifting the bell jar running a bath she senses this storm-stirred evening the mustiness of time I fade that has passed into wraiths of steam beneath it if I let my ears drop on the minute-hand below the waterline a faint fingerprint I can hear the screams magnifies the house surrounds me and magnifies riddled with emptiness in her tears out on the landing a sudden voice I draw a faint memory was it hers? two young children, playing she dabs at her eyes with the man and turns who lives on the stairs to the empty chair

I have my own ghosts still there they live here, too his outline, pressed occasionally into the upholstery a hand-print as if he’d just got up in the soil of potted plants for a moment for now with her frail fingers the tranquillity she puts the clock of white foam and flame forward while a furious howling another hour ransacks the rooms lost

~United Kingdom ~United Kingdom

Liam Wilkinson’s poetry has appeared in such journals as Modern English Tanka, Presence, Paper Wasp, Atlas Poetica, Simply Haiku, Bottle Rockets, Skylark, Lynx and many others. He has served as editor of Prune Juice, 3LIGHTS and Modern Haiga. He lives in North Yorkshire, England, and his website can be found at ldwilkinson.blogspot.co.uk

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 43 Echidna Lorne Henry

Lorne Henry photos of the son I didn’t know and wish I had The old farm house had rotten floorboards too late now he’s gone on its wraparound verandah but the views of the leaving long ago memories distant Barrington Mountains, sometimes snow capped in winter, the peace and quiet, made it my dog watches worth renting. as a car slows on the road A huge Port Jackson fig, with its wide- then races to me spreading branches, grew in front of the house, to let me know attracting many birds. It sent its roots in all we have mail directions, appearing like ropes as they crossed the dusty earth under the house. I cringe Many varieties of ants lived on this property as the audience —attracting the echidna or spiny anteater. claps in time Solitary animals, they mind their own business as with African singers they gorge on ants. the gap slowly widens One meandered quite close. Then it rolled over on its back, and a white golf ball of an egg I correct grammar rolled down its belly and disappeared into its of radio voices pouch. A rare sight. I wonder It waddled off through the grass to the next would I make such mistakes paddock. in a similar position native fig she calls in spreads its deep shade to say she’s been cows shelter phoning me for days life goes on around them my blank look birds drop more than figs says it all ~Australia Istanbul a long conversation Lorne Henry has been writing haiku for over twenty years and tanka for with a gentle Kurd eight years. She has had quite a number printed in magazines and waiting for taxis occasionally dabbles in Haibun. She lives in the countryside in the to return from prayers middle of a large farm in New South Wales, Australia. I think of that young waiter from Nepal his liquid eyes burning love for all

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 44 a winter’s day a cold morning I move around the verandah the greater egret with the sun flies in northbound jets lifting my spirits pencil the sky as the sun shines again a steer in the mirror lies down in the midday sun of another’s mind along its back eccentric a row of white egrets my brother told his children rest too “your aunt’s strange—but nice” once all kept quiet cool sunny day so dad could hear the news a weather change coming at seven o’clock my dog clings now I take a toilet break birds come to drink it will repeat in an hour silently late June by a billabong Venus and Mars of the Murray River a moon-width apart a dead duck I wait for clouds to clear cradled in my lap in the north-west dusk awakes and takes off a sweet smile air passengers she babbles like a babe annoyed by delays her husband comes but no country to feed her each evening can have any power and every meal on weekends over volcanic eruptions free the resident an electronic clock spider has gone but it’s set a meal to show days for a bird belonging to last year or life’s end blue wren bright fiddler crabs so beautiful a sacred kingfisher so vain among mangroves waking me each morning at night by moonlight pecking at his reflection fishing with dynamite croaks an icy wind and whirring of wings blows through the floorboards fifty ibis I snuggle up circle above the paddocks with my little dog turning as one my computer hibernates

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 45 re-reading scientific magazines The Isle of Linga so much seems new have I forgotten Lynda Monahan or didn’t I read them On Linga there is never any hurry, no ~Australia appointments, no deadlines. On Linga there is only the need to be, to let the days flow of their own accord. I fix up the south cottage and keep Lynn Tara Austin six chickens and a Shetland pony and an old border collie named Sam. There are coal oil Tanka Prose #1 lanterns and handmade quilts on the bed and a scrap of lace as a curtain, a stone fireplace with a I lean nearer the heater watching the patch big cast iron cooking pot where I simmer thick of blue getting smaller. Plans to see another soup all the day long. exhibition will have to wait. Days of rain and strong winds are forecast. Yesterday’s visit to the rough shelves select art space disappointed. My favourite artist of old and treasured volumes has moved to a new palette. His style doesn’t suit much loved books these colours. that smell of time and the wind and the sea beyond the grey cluster I let my hair grow long to my bum and I of tall buildings wear layers of skirts to my ankles and boots and mountains range heavy woollen jumpers. I learn the names of all into blue into blue the shorebirds and spend long hours watching the fishing boats out on the sea. Occasionally, one Tanka Prose #2 comes to the island and off hops a brawny fellow with a thick brogue and the kind of dark eyes A new cat turned up this morning. It looked women fall into. We spend the whole wild night down and out. Didn’t hear me when I called. It’s together and he is gone in the morning with a tortoise-shell fur really scraggy. I forgot to close promise to, one day, return. the garage door last night. Now it smells of cat’s pee. I hope another stray hasn’t decided this is . . . . . home. Wish I could move into a new place as easily. Spring and the mayweed and purple vetch and buttercups carpet the little island. The cliffs bumbling bee covered in a soft haze of sea pink and wild on the net thyme. Oyster plants grow near the shore. The curtain petrels and razorbills and gannets and the trying, like me pintails, with their chocolate brown heads and to find a way out their long white necks, busy the sky.

~Christchurch, New Zealand May sun Lynn Tara Austin is from Christchurch, New Zealand. She has gifting the ocean been published in several magazines, but more often in New Zealand the velvety moors Poetry Society’s annual anthology and Kokako, New Zealand’s with undulating ribbons magazine of Japanese forms. She received fourth place in the haiku section of the 2014 NZPS competition. of silvery light

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 46 The light so clear, the air so clean and bright Old Sam comes to his side for a scratch on Linga at this time of year. In the early behind the ears and a pat on the head, before he mornings I go with my wicker creel to gather settles on the braided rug near the fire. It is the seaweed for my garden and to say hello to the dark half of the year and the gales over the little little sea creatures in the tide pools. island have been fierce, bringing fog and sea haar, so that it is hard to distinguish land from sea from When the old moon holds the new moon in sky. It is a time for settling in with a roar of a fire her arms, I light a bonfire and you will come join and the oak table laden with currant scones, me. We will toss potatoes into the fire and when which we eat with Crowdie cheese rich with they are baked and crisp we will pull them from garlic and herbs, a gift he has brought from the flames and eat them hot with butter and Orkney. chives. Your man will bring a flagon of dark rum, given to him as a gift by the captain of a passing Edan has come, as the sea is no man’s friend freighter. And we will tell tales and laugh long this weather. He is a man not given overmuch to into the night. speaking, a quiet fellow, but he speaks with a soft singsong lilt, remnants of the old Norse dialect, a ceilidh wonderful for storytelling. He is a fast and loyal on summer nights friend to your man and it is this telling of stories the stars that passes the winter’s nights. Edan sits on the clans of constellations three legged stool, spinning tales of his singing their ancient songs grandfather’s father and the old ways. It is a night of laughter among friends and as dawn hints Then your man will pick you up, light as a greyly on the horizon, Edan and I make our way gull’s feather, and the two of you, slightly tipsy over the blustery heath back to my little croft, his and giggling, will head off down the footpath to arm firm round my waist, the footpath lit by the your croft on the north side of Linga. fretful sun.

In the morning your man will plant for you a In winter, each storm that moves in over The red currant bush, on the lee side, away from the Orkneys is a wild woman, wind. You will sit watching him, admiring his strong back as he bends to the shovel. I join you bean sith for tea and oatcakes and you read to me your screaming and cursing poetry from a tattered blue notebook. Around us and throwing things about the moors glorious with the gold of the broom in naught to do but hunker down July, the purple carpet of heather come August. till she is done with her ranting.

almost rain You and your man snuggled safe and warm the island wears in your little north croft. I will have battened all a thick collar of mist, the windows and cooked an apple pandowdy the night is fog dense over my fire and I will light my lamp and read sea spraying up veils of white the old classics, which I save for weather such as this. Jane Eyre and Sense and Sensibility and Emma. I Edan, for that is his name, warms himself by will read into the small hours when there will the fire, having only just arrived, his sweater come a loud rapping at my door and there, in all steaming, a dark pint on the table. He has untied his dripping wet glory, is my Edan who brought his hair and it falls in damp curls about his his boat up on the shores of Linga, having barely shoulders. He calls me mo muirnin, my darling, survived the roiling sea. He will stay three full flashing that wild grin of his. days while the storm woman rages and we will

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 47 make our own fierce nights and by day he will read to me from Emma and all too soon, the skies Trodden Weed will clear and he will be away to his other mistress, the great dark sea. M. Kei

In the hush after the storm has passed, all is quiet on Linga. The seals have a new batch of When I look at the paintings of Andrew pups down in the cove. Oh, how beautiful, the Wyeth, I am looking back over my shoulder at little ones. White as fresh snow, they are, with big the world I inhabit. I know this country he paints. liquid eyes. I watch them from the bank for Many are the times I’ve driven its backroads hours, old Sam at my side, the storm petrels and while turkey vultures drifted overhead, each of us kittiwakes screeing overhead, the briny scent of as patient and pointless as the other. We were seaweed on the morning air. going somewhere, me and the vultures. It’s nowhere, but we’ll recognize it when we find it Spring again and I have planted purple and then we’ll feed on it. We’re all part of the heather and wild mountain thyme near my little stubbled snow and deer dying in spring, corpses cottage. My six chickens have gifted me with a left along the side of the road for someone dozen brown speckled eggs. I dream of my sailor hungry enough to feast on what the world has who risks his life out there on the swells in his discarded. small red skiff. When I cross the Mason-Dixon line, I know it. The land is different. The houses are different. he will return before long, Even when somebody has built a tidewater bringing me oatcakes farmhouse up here, it doesn’t look like its relatives and a soft shawl down in Maryland. The Pennsylvania tidewater made from Shetland lambswool, houses always look depressed, like an older the pearly color of the moon. woman enduring the man she’s married to. Covered in ancient siding in drab colors, ~United Kingdom Pennsylvania houses know nothing of the blue and yellow of the Chesapeake. When I cross over the line between Wyeth’s The island of Linga is located in the scenic and sheltered Vaila paintings, I know where I am. They are full of Sound on the west side of Shetland. Linga is a place of spectacular winter-burnt grasses and stubbled fields with scenery and beauty with an abundance of wildlife. Linga has two derelict cottages on the north and south sides of the island, which have muddy drifts of melting snow. That is a true been uninhabited since 1934. representation of Pennsylvania. So are the dank houses with their tiny windows. You have to go south to find big windows that embrace the sea Lynda Monahan is the author of three poetry collections, the most and the sun. The Pennsylvania houses huddle in recent is Verge, published in the spring of 2015 by Guernica Editions. Many of her tanka have seen publication—this is her first published the white canvas left unpainted. Wyeth knows tanka prose. She lives near Prince Albert. Saskatchewan,Canada in the these fields well. Nesbit Forest. My favorite Wyeth painting is a pair of boots. They are rendered in the same yellow brown as the mud and dead grasses on which they stand. They come up over the man’s knees and disappear under the black pea coat. This man has no other body; he is a pair of boots. Not feet, boots. I recognize these boots—they’ve appeared in many paintings before, generally adorning the legs of an imaginary pirate. They once belonged

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 48 to the illustrator Howard Pyle, he who invented our modern stereotype of the pirate with bucket The Rusted Sword Has No boots, sash, and frilly shirt. Speaking as a sailor, I Reflection know such garb is preposterous. It would snag in the rigging, and then you’d be dead. As a child I knew nothing of this. I was full of dreams and M. Kei stories. I yearned for boots over my knees and a distant horizon. I know how you feel about churches. I always The boots in the painting are still intact after find myself staring out the window at God’s real decades. As a boy, Wyeth wore them for dress up cathedral when I’m in one. Fortunately, I have as he gamboled across this countryside. found a place that suits me: a Quaker meeting Homeschooled, his companions were Robin house with no heat, electricity, or plumbing. We Hood, Long John Silver, and a host of other open all the windows and doors in summer and swashbucklers. I knew them too. Robin Hood huddle in our coats in winter. was my best friend. Whatever else may have There is no need for what Quakers call happened; the days, months, and years of ‘external signs’—churches, scriptures, altars, unemployment, the repeated scrabbling for food stained glass, ministers, or anything else. Just a and medication, and the crumpling of childhood place to keep the rain off your head while dreams, I never gave them up. I needed them. listening for the divine. Needed to know that the gallant Scarlet Pimpernel would rescue people from injustice. yes, Mishima, Not me, because I lived in the real world and he I too felt those arrows, lived in a fantasy, but somewhere, a gentleman in but stubbornly, a swank pair of boots was putting spurs to horse I never carried the saints and arriving to save the day. on my back Wyeth must feel what I feel. He painted this self portrait while recuperating from surgery that ~United States removed a lung. Half his breath was gone, but he donned the old hero boots and walked the hard cold dirt of Chadd’s Ford, Pennsylvania. And M. Kei is a tall ship sailor and award-winning poet who lives on then he paused, looked down, and saw the Maryland’s Eastern shore. He is the editor of Atlas Poetica : A Trodden Weed that gave the painting its name. Journal of World Tanka. His most recent collection of poetry is He was alive in the face of mortality, but the January, A Tanka Diary. He is also the author of a gay Asian-themed fantasy novel, Fire Dragon. He can be followed on Twitter weed was not. Just like that, it had bent and @kujakupoet, or visit AtlasPoetica.org. broken beneath the cavalier tread of a dreamer.

I have no grandchildren as of yet; a friend tells me about his pet tarantulas

~Maryland, USA

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 49 the night chills Mac Miller in Tel Aviv a whistle blast . . . warm smiles return my neighbor after “all clear” divorced three times polishes his old car the choir giggles with such tenderness when sun rays reflect from father’s surplice winter moon they call him a shaft of light saint kaleidoscope crosses my face our young son’s brand new torch the snow melts a fresh start . . . movietone news on the back black and white of divorce papers by the exit unfinished haiku a row of faces alien green waving silent march past they drift slowly one soldier towards heaven at the front again in that ridiculous embarrassed by balloon his squeaky wheels bestowed tell me in the darkness how can i feel of that ancient place so much grief i find the power from black ink in a light switch on paper holding on to ~New Zealand a soldier’s headstone she scrapes mud from the soles of her Mac Miller was born in England in 1941, lived in London. Married black leather boots to Barbara 1964. Emigrated to New Zealand 1966. Two children one boy Scott, one girl Ruth. After a seven year apprenticeship in Fleet Street printing plate making started his own business in Hamilton. Retired a thousand stars after thirty years but before this and during had a strong interest in light the night amateur photography which he now shares with writing Haiku, Tanka and Kyoka. Mac lives with his wife in Hamilton, Waikato, New with diamonds Zealand. as clouds cover Hollywood

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 50 their protection Normandie 2014 flagrant entrapment those cold stones Margaret Van Every embracing the walled city emptying breath lining the narrow roads ~France leafless arms of poplars champagne flutes lifted to autumn The tanka in this submission comprise a sequence from a trip I made to salute a cloudless day Normandy in November of 2014 coinciding with Armistice Day. For the French it is a solemn commemoration of the end of WWI in which they lost nearly 8.5 million troops. While there I spent most of my time in Normandy where I also visited the D-Day Landing Beaches and the in skeletal limbs cemetery-memorial where so many US soldiers remain. I mention here my encounters with the world wars as well as other cruelties—the balls of mistletoe— burning of Jeanne d’Arc in Rouen and the suffering of Van Gogh, all for trees the kiss of death part of the larger panorama of man’s inhumanity that has built to the the French need present era. no excuse to kiss

Margaret Van Every resides in a village in Jalisco, Mexico. She has authored two books of tanka: A Pillow Stuffed with Diamonds charolais grazing Bilingual/Una Almohada Rellena con Diamantes Bilingue emerald pastures and hedgerows (Librophilia 2011) and holding hands with a stranger (Librophilia ghost bunkers rimming the cliffs 2014). She also has a book of traditional poetry entitled Saying Her Name (Librophilia 2013). surfers glide ashore the beaches of Normandy tears in Normandy for Vincent Van Gogh the Maid of Orleans Omaha Beach and the rest of us

I stand before that scene in Auvers-sur-Oise view with Vincent’s eyes crows dotting the ochre field that same day the gun reaching to the horizon crosses row on row; beneath my feet the fallen I sob into the hanky of my long-dead father

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 51 Snowball 1.0 Snowball 1.1

Marianne Paul Marianne Paul

The word makes me happy. Snowball. The The photo is cracked in that way of old happiness and the word come from somewhere photos, old memories. My big sister, a long- deep inside. I dig for the source of the happiness, legged colt of a child in the photo, holds a kitten, and there, at the centre, is a snowball bush. The its legs dangling from her grasp. Oh look, Snowball, ball-flowers are immense. I’m little, standing on our cat, she tells me. But I don’t remember a cat, the front lawn of the family home. The bush is nor previous family conversations about one. flowering overtop, and through the flowers, the Who is this family cat of which no one spoke? All sun. A ball of sun, the snowball of flowers, and those childhood years of pestering my mother for my mother, her own ball of warmth, the heart- a pet. Pets die, she had dismissed the topic, no centre of my small world, her glowing aura of room for discussion. Your suffering would be yellows and oranges. unbearable.

the tree Siddhartha’s father i thought dead builds higher castle walls blooms— to keep out sorrow— at night i dream you the cut flowers in the crystal vase fresh as life are wilting anyway

~Kitchener, Canada ~Kitchener, Canada

Marianne Paul is a Canadian novelist and poet. Recently, she has been learning the craft of minimalist poetry, including tanka, tanka prose, haiku and haibun. Her work has appeared in many contemporary journals, both online and in print. As well as writing, Marianne is passionate about all things “lake, river and stream” and is an avid interior landscapes kayaker. Visit her online at www.literarykayak.com, www.mariannepaul.com or on twitter @mariannpaul. Marianne Paul Illusion although i’m inside the house i’m outside the house. my parents chat in the living room, an irony, i suppose, since they are dead. gigantic koi Marilyn Humbert swim in puddles left by the rain. the presence of the koi strike me as odd, even in the dream. then ember-eyes peep i become aware of the cats. why are they so big? over the edge of night someone picks one up. perhaps it is my mother, hunting perhaps it is me. the cat is gigantic in my arms. i through the labyrinth am worried. so many cats. what will become of inside my mind them? who will care for them? Tangled in damp sheets. all those ancestors living inside of me each poem i write Outside, breeze teases leaves high in the canopy. my death poem Starlight on my pillow.

~Kitchener, Canada ~Pompapiel, Victoria, Australia

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 52 Storm 7th Grade Choir

Marilyn Humbert Marsha Oseas

I answer the phone . . . your voice doesn’t In 7th grade, I was in the school choir. This sound like you. was rare for me as I was not usually a “joiner,” I don’t understand. but I liked to sing and I liked the teacher, Mr. Why the ticking clock keeps time with my Walker. In the spring of the year, the choir was heartbeat. scheduled to give a recital in the multi-purpose I stare outside. room, in the evening so parents and family could come. I was excited. raindrops The day of the recital, right before dinner, on the window after daddy had come home from work, my this morning mother said, “You don’t mind if we don’t go, do of tears . . . you? She was not tired from work like daddy; she you in shadow didn’t even have a job. Daddy, as usual, said nothing. I replied, “Sure, that’s fine,” feigning ~Berowra, NSW, Australia nonchalance. Daddy dropped me off at the school, in silence. It was sad singing in the recital with no one in the audience for me. Afterwards, a mother of a friend asked me where my parents were and Sparrow’s Rest I told her they were out of town. Then I walked home alone. Marilyn Humbert harmonies delight choir recital, parents night Grandmother’s house is made of mud and mine stay home, don’t care straw, hidden in a circle of peppercorn trees, set I so wish they had been there back from the gravel road. A dirt track edged in tender heart was in despair boxthorns, home of many small birds, leads to the front door and two small rooms; living area ~United States and bedroom. Built by my great grandfather on the land selected in the early 1880’s; a first settler After spending the better part of four decades working in law firms and in this part of North Central Victoria. Heavily later for the government where the writing offended her with its timbered then, now plains horizon to horizon are purposeful verbosity and incomprehensibility, Marsha Oseas is relieved criss-crossed with wire and post fences. to be writing tanka.

summer mists Marilyn Humbert lives in the Northern suburbs of Sydney, NSW, across the grasslands surrounded by bush. Her pastimes include writing free verse, tanka, haiku and related genre. Her tanka and haiku can be found online, in home . . . Australian and overseas journal and anthologies. Some of her free verse pushed and tugged poems have been awarded prizes in competitions and some have been in perpetual motion published.

~Calivil, Victoria, Australia

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 53 Marshall Bood Martin Anderson city park— chord sounds loud and clear a boy building strummed in perfect pitch mud pies not a dull note heard his father fishing practicing ere perfection dusk the Guitar sings from my soul

~Derby, United Kingdom cardiac surveillance unit . . . the doctor Martin Anderson was born in 1955 in Bristol, UK, and after an early congratulates him education in music, took up a career in programming. Having lived 20 years in Germany he returned to the UK in 1990, and set up the poetry on a long life web-site Poetic Heart, but due to work pressure this closed down after 3 years. A renewed interest in poetry now has him writing Tanka based on the syllabic formula 5-7-5-7-7. now an established author he tells me how to pronounce his last name Tanka Life a man bangs against Matsukaze her window with a stick all night always the same dream a blue tree moving in me a man inch by inch with a torn shirt burning, burning, burning in the laundry room vents about bad tenants needed to escape everything ~Canada slid out of my bathroom window into a pulsating night Marshall Bood lives in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. He escapes to Wascana Park all year round. evening rhythm after 4 am a pre-dawn rainpour— thick drops grave this concrete world

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 54 come morning half listening to him a few words our lives from his grab-bag are nothing more of satirical replies— than fragments thick rainfall running into each other after 4:30 am home losing myself from a long day between the pages of working, of the Torah slipping this body ash clouds arrive into a chamomile bath it’s been too long another night since i’ve another faceless dame weaved words moaning. breathing. into acceptable tanka . . . hiking up her skirt senryu was my thing unsure of what i’m seeking over rainpour a peanut butter sandwich this Sunday morning listening starring out the window to my dead-beat dad waiting for him make amends to deliver the newspapers these tanka in silence . . . often composed letting fragments randomly, impulsively of tanka songs under various stimuli . . . pour out of these this is the tanka life tired fingertips

‘maternal line’ on the eaves hearing the voices certain Hindu charms hang of the matriarchs from inside the hotel staring in a mirror i dream i see their faces looking back of the curved staircase no more hot water another shot of tequila— in this crackpot hotel when was it . . . lighting a cigarette. that you ceased standing on to be a man? an old balcony crying 23 yrs in internment camps

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 55 each time your father somehow makes an entrance senryu music into your life has paralyzed you become the rhythm that neglected little boy of tanka beats and all

enjoying down in the pit a morning Coke of my soul all this talk of a thin wall inside legalized gay marriage a huge cottage from those who’ll never do it painted dull grey this world has quickly become cool blue an ugly place of Hilton Head waters of racism a morning prayer and misplaced morals uttered on pure, white beaches LGBT family why do you despise those who do not agree we are humans with your stance yet often when it’s their right? we attack each other in animalistic ways Hetero family that seems to linger why do you disagree with those who choose to be from the belly of darkness gay? two women from the halfway house in these silent moments arrive to start i find myself this morning’s breakfast wanting to jump naked in the vivid red of a Coke can it’s been hard no man in my life down the block and always work— at Excelsior’s the fragrance met this attractive Latino of fresh fig spread his greeting as smooth as sandpaper accustomed in this now for the last month feeling the correction to distilling my emotions of G-D, in senryu i often wonder i struggle with tanka will i make it

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 56 in a hidden journal buried somewhere eyes in my soul i hate myself Matsukaze & Joy McCall for liking men nothing stirring wonder why in this thick silence so many gay people at the kitchen table get upset enjoying the taste when one says: of apple strudel ‘I chose to live this way’ half asleep skin. morning coffee the blackest of black— and a biscuit to be gay it doesn’t take much is to add to make me smile insult to injury for James Baldwin washing out my plate a great many things from the window i want to do seeing dense darkness i’ve always had this problem and pre-morning plums with movement blackbirds on the blueberries in my 33rd year in the warm sun i decided I should have picked to do something my share yesterday life-altering . . . dyed my beard blond always those black, shiny plums met friends for coffee resembling the first time omniscient eyes watching i met you my every move it wasn’t long before i knew you were gay when eyes are watching you i hate death! look into them i hate knowing that who knows where each human being you may find love? is moving toward that unknown! ~United States / England

~Louisiana, USA Joy McCall is a nurse/counsellor, retired because of paraplegia following a motorcycle crash. She has written all kinds of poetry for 50 years, publishing occasionally here and there. She lives on the edge of the Matsukaze old walled city of Norwich, England, having spent much of her life in resides in Louisiana USA Canada. She treasures most her loved ones, nature, books, words and a classical vocalist and actor tattoos, life, and poetry. Keibooks published her ‘circling smoke, scattered lover/composer of tanka, sedoka, bones’, ‘hedgerows’ and ‘rising mist, fieldstones’. She thanks M. Kei for ryuka, and senryu his constant support.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 57 A wink Eidolon Gyeongsang Province, Korea Matthew Caretti Matthew Caretti

and a nod to the charlatans. Playing on our fear of death. Of not knowing. Oblivion. The abbot of the hermitage offers a smile and Promising that which cannot be bought. Or sold. returns my bow. “Befriend your ghosts, then dispel them.” He guides me to a cell only paces a handshake from the Master’s, his three years of seclusion and a signed first edition nearly at an end. For me, this just a short liberation reprieve. A reminder of how to be still among guaranteed to whispers from the past. Visions of the future. bind then tatter high window ~Flushing, Newe York, USA view to the bluest sky the sound of midday chants filters through

~Korea Atop Nanjing Wall

Matthew Caretti The “Alpha” Romeo The ad men smile. Look on. A Ferrari spins counter-clockwise, away from the present into an age of decadent dynasties. When the cobbled Maxianne Berger rampart preserved the emperor and his concubines. Europe on 5 Dollars A Day was current. Twenty black lines and ready for the world, my best friend and I the calligraphy of were on our way to Venice—she seated behind good fortune me, barely stifling her guffaws. newly translated by paparazzi models the usual way hitchhiking through Italy ~China the driver of the Alfa Romeo Influenced in equal parts by his study of German language and his hand on my inner thigh literature, by his Zen training in the East, and by the approach of the Beat writers, Matthew’s work has appeared in numerous print and ~Italy online journals. In 2014, his “That Which Binds Us” was selected for Broadsided’s Haiyan Response special feature and “Renunciation” Maxianne Berger is a poet and literary translator. Her poems wander was named Honorable Mention in the Genjuan International Haibun between the minimalism of Japanese forms and the unpremeditated Contest. Matthew currently resides in Flushing, NY. outcomes of OuLiPo-style constraints. She lives in Montreal.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 58 Barks The Whites of her Eyes

Mike Montreuil Mike Montreuil

In the background I can hear your dog That was a dream I shouldn’t have had. barking. It’s as if he knows I am on the phone to Should I tell her that she was the object of my you. desires; how she kneeled on the bed, dressed only in bright white panties and bra. Sunday evening the planets First kiss . . . align themselves my legs sore under the cover from running of a full moon away from her boyfriend ~Ottawa, Ontario, Canada ~Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Mike Montreuil lives in the coldest capital city in the world, Ottawa, Canada. His English and French haiku, tanka, and haibun have been published online or in print. You may find him observing the wildlife in one of Ottawa’s many coffee shops. Heroics

Mike Montreuil

Gray clouds are moving in, ready for anything and everything we desire. There’s so Strange Noises much want between you and I, but time is interrupting our little nest egg. If you look closely, Natsuko Wilson you’ll see very little between us; only the sweat from nightmares that wakes up the living and a coelacanth from the depth of the Indian Ocean. offering a spectacular ocean view fourth down the hotel and goal promises us seven nights who’s turn silent and peaceful to fumble their heroics against our wishes ~Ottawa, Ontario, Canada we wake up during the night on and off with banging, crashing noises

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 59 leading us to the third sleepless night Miriam Sagan the noises come at 11:04, 12:50, 1:41, 3:15 and 6:34— red peonies take “What are they doing?” “no one else’s approach” in this garden, neat pretty house knocking vast far-away on our neighbors’ door we ask them I sit on the steps of Emily Carr’s house, and if they hear the noises— admire the great British Columbian painter’s “Yes, we do but we don’t report” garden. She was a modernist, almost a Cubist, painting a Native way of life that was already over. on the fourth day we tell the management— totem poles decay “We will investigate at the edge of sleep, and let you know what it is lost dream, as soon as possible” village ravaged by smallpox a drifting boat a local tour guide ~Canada explains, “Old-time ghosts are still alive and active in the new hotel”

“Their forests and their ocean being taken away Miriam Sagan they are angry at what it has become” Seattle airport:

Dear ghosts! an old woman our hearts go out to you, pushes her mother’s hair but please, beneath the veil— don’t send your messages I touch my own through the air conditioner streak of white

~Punta de Mita, Mexico while north African women in brilliant chiffon headscarves take them off and casually adjust them in public as if they were relaxing at home. Natsuko Wilson lives in Ontario. She has published four books of non- fiction in Japan. Currently she writes articles for a Japanese online newspaper. ~United States

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 60 Miriam Sagan So Many Birds, So Little Time We rented a house on the Oregon coast, it was right next to a botanical garden where we walked Neal Whitman every day.

tsunami warning John James Audubon painted hundreds of and a plan we half enjoy birds, but five puzzle ornithologists to this day worrying about— because he left no specimens and they have never marimbas of raindrops been spotted in nature by generations of birders on giant leaves who have been looking since these birds appeared in The Birds of America published in 1827. ~United States on my windowsill Miriam Sagan is the author of 25 books, including TANKA carbonated swamp warbler FROM THE EDGE (MET Press) and SEVEN PLACES IN wakes me with a tweet AMERICA: A Poetic Sojourn (Sherman Asher Books). She founded and directs the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community my alarm clock is buzzing College in New Mexico and blogs at Miriam’s Well (http:// had I dreamed I was awake? miriamswell.wordpress.com). ~San Francisco’s Coast of Bohemia, California, USA Neal Whitman lives in Pacific Grove, California, where his poetry and his wife, Elaine’s, photography are inspired by the Monterey Peninsula and its surrounding sea. In 2014, Neal won 1st prize in the HSA Brady Memorial Contest and 1st honorable mention in the HSA Haibun Contest; in 2015, his tanka won 1st honorable mention in the UHTS Fleeting Words Tanka Contest. His tanka prose is scheduled for publication in Dos Gatos Press,Poetry of the American Southwest, Persona Poems. Incognito

Right Here Neal Whitman

Neal Whitman In high school, I raced between classes to get to my seat of choice: last row, last seat. I even went up the down staircase. I was five feet small I walk under the waving prayer flags and and could lay low and avoid being called on by take off my shoes. The door opens. I make a the teacher. The one class I liked was Biology. donation. on that branch breathe in is that a stick or insect? catch myself twig-like breathe out when threatened it freezes green tea follows as I do in Geometry morning meditation ~Framingham High School, Class of 1965, ~Manjushri Dharma Center, Pacific Grove, California, Framingham, Massachusetts, USA USA

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 61 the jigsaw puzzle Patricia Prime gets more chaotic as it grows “Buckingham Palace” extends to where its cover shows I remember walking the guards, the flags and people down the river path through meadow grass to visit my sweetheart clouds wander taking steps in the right direction only to reassemble on the horizon in bands of pink and yellow my own shadow in the setting sun on the kitchen tiles as I tilt my face acknowledging my presence I have a 3D bookmark in this cruel world in the pages of a book by my bed and night by night it’s moved say what you like from one page to another but a candle throwing light in the dark or nectarines ripening there were jigsaws on the sill bring happiness in the rest home lounge all the pieces locked perfectly into their neighbour there the remains not by residents but by their families of a stone gateway slap-bang in the middle of a field a haunting ruin of days a young woman long since passed smiles into her mobile phone a thin sack filled with heart-shaped the disease balloons over her shoulder spreads inside her brain like a white fern bones fragile as glass, this urban street but she smiles and comforts others is never empty glimpses of lives in gardens, windows and shops it depends where you are yet all the front doors look the same in the scene, the mountains far away but the pine branches some people drop words stroking your face in the shade into conversations I listen to them ripple and spread, but wait until I’m sure I can enter the stream

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 62 catching myself walking like an old woman Home Thoughts I check my gait stand upright, raise my head Patricia Prime as I appraise my stride

We didn’t have the means to mend what was here in the terminal always broken, so my mother covered the holes I watch as you depart punched in the walls during crazy fights between joining the line brothers and sisters with cheap paintings. They until you turn, send a look hung in the most unusual places like Band-Aids and a smile over your shoulder covering a scar.

one red matchbox car so let’s do everything parked behind a photograph we should have done beyond the grasp all along— of feuding children— whatever will drag us mother’s solution from the mudslide of life ~London, England the glossy tinkle of oak leaves still attached after snowfall the clear blue sky in winter icy as a frozen lake A Touch of the Remote a scruffy blackbird sunbathes wings akimbo Patricia Prime by the hedge as I spend an hour or two weeding the flower beds Scratched by chickens, a red yard, swept by a homemade besom. The old woman beckons us in. Squatting on a stool, she offers us balls of rice. just to tell you We take her hands in ours when we leave, smile today the sky is the colour and murmur zài jjiàn. Then return to the smog of of a duck’s egg the city, the crowds and bicycles. with that particular clarity of light on a frosty day light sharpens the shadow on your cheek you are homesick ~New Zealand for the farmland, cows and the milking shed

~Beijing, China

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 63 Ski Slopes Experience

Patricia Prime Patricia Prime

“That was the night Lady Koma had her embarrassing Beside the frozen lake we make a snowman. experience.”—The Diary of Lady Murasaki Japanese tourists seem bewildered by the sight. When we throw snowballs at each other, they biceps gleaming laugh and join in the fun. he gardens till dusk his bare hands in the ski shop stained red by the darkness tourists try on deerskin hats moist and warm and Swiss knits with pom poms and tassels after a shower they leave with Kiwi beanies I wrap my hair in a towel turban fashion ~Arthur’s Pass, South Island, New Zealand shadows deepen at breast and inner thigh, eyes brighten

bread, cheese and fruit waiting I drink half the wine I kept for him In-Between Cloudbursts why is he so late? reclining nude Patricia Prime on the white coverlet sprinkled with petals my hips curve The wind whistles outside. A dense rain pelts in the pale moonlight the iron roof punishing the sponge-like ground, penetrating the mud and pathway, roots and I remember our first night in the freezing trees, trying to tell me something. Something I temperature of the new house: you had worked am now beginning to understand. Spring will all day in the garden until darkness fell. We soon return and always will. dreamed of one day having a son, your body in the semi-gloom turning to me, the whisper of my a shadow creature pet name. While you were still asleep, I crept to wanders across the garden the window and looked at the stars, summoning a stray cat up an image of the child yet to be born. The full soaking wet and bedraggled moon sailed through the sky through every fold startled by the falling hail of the clouds, stirring my thoughts as a mother might think about her coming child every ~Te Atatu South, Auckland, New Zealand moment of the day. To the world it made no difference that I tossed about for an hour or two, till what was left of the night faded into morning.

~New Zealand

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 64 During the Blitz Hidden Things

Patricia Prime Patricia Prime & Anne Benjamin

mum’s tears when she found in a tin box left behind frozen ground on the dining table birdcalls in the trees the soldier’s sugar ration at dawn and a love note to him a tui’s song trembles on the edge of my dream When dad left for the war in Germany, mum stayed at home awaiting the birth of a new baby. We older children were evacuated to the through lifting fog Midlands after the worst bombardment of a jet streams straight ahead London. above Lake George Before we were sent to safety, we took refuge turbo blades in the wind from the blasts in an Anderson shelter: a large point different ways iron table surrounded by wire mesh that looked like a huge lion’s cage. Inside were mattresses on which we slept. I think we barely flinched when a leaving the city particularly heavy raid blew in the windows or dead leaves float down shattered the crockery or a bomb landed on a forecasting winter nearby house. Shards of glass impaled reminding me themselves in doors and gardens, roof tiles fell in of the distance between us the street, plaster dropped from ceilings and sirens and searchlights rent the night sky. Great spokes of light up the darkness and this morning’s sun black-out curtains were taped against the spreads weak and pale windows. A candle was lit to guide us to the behind the mist toilet. The lone woman drew faces on her knees these questions to amuse us. Far away our father became for which there’s no clear answer immersed in the futility of war.

before it exploded freezing winter the silence of a doodlebug the ‘postie’ on his motorbike as a policeman wears a leather jacket, bundled us into a blue thick gloves and a scarf police telephone box covering his mouth ~England

Patricia Prime is the co-editor of Kokako, review/interviews editor of migrant women Haibun Today, reviewer & interviewer for Takahe, a reviewer for Atlas locked inside language Poetica, Meverse Muse, The World Almanac of Poetry (Mongolia). voiceless refugees— She recently published Shizuka with French poet Giselle Maya. so many hidden things Anne Benjamin is a poet based in Sydney, Australia, with family links I want to shout about to South India. Her published writing includes free verse poetry, fiction, non-fiction and academic works with a particular interest in writing tanka, response tanka and tanka prose. ~New Zealand / Australia

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 65 Misterioso Snow Country

Peter Fiore Peter Fiore

I have two black toes, big toes on each foot, from If I were Japanese once, I lived alone on a slamming into the feet of my wife’s tree trunk mountain and listened to the wind ringing in the coffee table when we first started seeing each dark trees, ate rice and drank tea made from other. Doc says I can cure that but you don’t roots and ferns, complained about the Emperor want the side effects, and it doesn’t always work. and played the flute under falling stars. Also have a black thumb inherited from my mom which I’ve been treating with rubbing alcohol ~United States with some success. Anyway, decided to get a mani-pedicure and foot massage when I was in Bali last winter. They worked on me for an hour and a half. Half hour at least on my big toes. Cleaning them out and cutting them back slowly. My nails so smooth, polished and almost beautiful. The Intercontinental is a city in itself. Dizzier and Dizzier Like living inside the Green Zone. Outside its walls, on the road to the airport, teenage girls beg Peter Fiore with babies in their arms.

Each day begins differently. The bedroom is gray, ~United States sky lighter than the trees. Outside a conversation of birds.

“Bird ain’t dead,” one says. “He’s hiding out Solo Piano for a Chinese somewhere and he’ll be back with some new shit Garden that’ll scare everyone to death.” “You know, man.” Another says, “I once had a dream where Peter Fiore I played like that . . . ” He’d devised a system of blind alleys and trap And before he finishes another goes, “Whenever doors we met, we used to kiss on the mouth.” All the other birds called him Diz. so that at any time she could surprise him

Listen, my brother told me the top of Black and never find what she was looking for. Virgin Mountain was held by the Special Forces, the middle by the Viet Cong, and the base by a Gradually she came to know this and relied on corps of Army Engineers. The only water was a appearances. Their walks became inspections well in the middle, and by mutual agreement over the stone paths, wild ferns and lotus ponds neither side would carry weapons there. that led them silently over the same ground.

White boys! Black boys!! What else do you need Knowing this too wouldn’t last. to know? ~United States ~United States

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 66 Improvisation #9 Riding Bicycle

Peter Fiore Pravat Kumar Padhy

When I woke Nancy, her nipples were already I was quite afraid of it—how to pedal cycle rising, little cones in the moonlight. Oh chocha through the rush hour. Slowly crossing my leg to whocha oh oh chocha woohcha oh chochawhocha. the other side, I simply dragged myself with half- pedalling, carefully holding the handle which At breakfast you tell me you love me. By lunch otherwise swung like uncontrolled wind! we’re not talking, again. After a long practice, on an auspicious day, I harvested strong will power and used to feel on ~United States top of the world while travelling down the meandering road, of course, during a thin traffic hour. Time swam in its course. It was equally amusing when my daughter rode the bicycle at an early age without much storm of angst, albeit I used to follow her carrying all apprehensions of Blue Note yesteryear! a tiny bird Peter Fiore on its maiden flight the breeze As part of his rehab, or is it penance, Gino goes carries memories to a senior nudist of my childhood age colony outside San Diego. Suddenly he begins to ~India see tits and dicks as comic characters in a novel he’s stopped writing. Pravat Kumar Padhy hails from Odisha, India. He holds a Masters in Science and a Ph.D from IIT-Dhanbad. His poems have been featured With no place to in anthologies and periodicals of repute. His haiku, tanka and haiga have appeared in the leading journals. His poetry won the Editors’ Choice Award at Asia American Poetry, Poetbay, USA , Writers’ Guild carry his cell he gives up phone sex. of India, The Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival, Canada, UNESCO International Year of Water Co-operation, The Kloštar ~United States Ivanić International Haiku Commendation Award and Creatrix Haiku Commendation Award.

Peter Fiore lives and writes in Mahopac, New York, USA. His poems have been published in American Poetry Review, Rattle, Atlas Poetica, Bright Stars, A Hundred Gourds, Ribbons and others. In 2009, Peter published “text messages,” the first volume of poetry totally devoted to Gogyohka. In May 2015, Peter’s book of tanka prose, “flowers to the torch”, was published by Keibooks.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 67 Rebecca Drouilhet Dharma Tracks

Richard St. Clair the stories we tell as the night grows darker . . . a shape shifter inner turmoil flies toward the breaking dawn outer peace carrying a new legend the buddha keeps me on track will I ever stand this tall again . . . behind me what is it my life as a crumpled doll this nirvana ahead the journey out of night everyone talks about but nobody understands flames lick the pages of my history book and by the glare more age spots I watch the ghosts go dancing more wrinkles with madmen and fools slowing down awaiting the floating bridge to bliss a shade this morning of the first autumn coolness . . . I, a blind woman, my wild days explore the changing face long gone of my own times did i learn anything after all? drunk on the moon and the devil’s wine . . . so high remembering I see the shadows of stars, the curtains of taste the salt of lost oceans northern lights my private vision ~United States of the pure land Inspired by Peggy Willis Lyles

Saint Augustine referred to poetry as ‘the devil’s wine’. lust begone! terrorize me no more! Rebecca Drouilhet is a retired registered nurse who has had her haiku and tanka published in a wide range of print journals and e-zines. She let me live in peace and her husband have written a book of haiku titled Lighting a Path. like a bodhisattva She enjoys playing word games and visiting with her large family.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 68 knowing much o to be understanding little in the company such is why of a thousand i turn million buddhas to the buddha soon it’s where i’ll be! the larger sutra the tracks its exquisite words of the dharma uplift me are easy to follow take me guided by the buddha out of myself of infinite life sometimes if the dharma the thought of death were pure water terrifies me i could live other times on that water it comforts me forever no matter i gave up on if i were famous the stink of zen i’d soon years ago be forgotten for the sweet by and by fragrance of amida i yearn whenever i chant for the understanding the buddha’s name of a buddha a million cheers to be saved go up from this ignorance from the buddhas not a pure land what a wonder it’s the pure land i will see i yearn for when i where i’ll go breathe my last without a doubt in my last body not my glory what pain but the glory the buddha of the buddha must have felt in whose light being enlightened i bask while living in this form if i could amazing! just understand by amida’s power this karma i will leap over would i suffer the bodhisattva stage any less? to enlightenment!

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 69 step one—have faith from today’s step two— aches and pains leave this body from my unknowable step three— past become buddha! soon will i be free at times i trust this body that i am guarded feels so alien by countless buddhas waiting known for buddhahood yet unseen no matter distractions my past taking me away transgressions from thoughts by buddha’s power of the buddha— i am saved such foolishness! small pleasures what little of this life i have seen cannot compare of the pure land to the bliss is all i need that is to come! to yearn for it all when will i meet having given up in the pure land on doubts with my friends on reservations my one-time enemies— on calculations when will it be? i’m saved by amida though mara tries if you knew he can never my karma shake me you would know from this road to bliss— my gratitude thank you amida! to amida buddha i need not work as a child nor strive nor worry i made angels amida does all in the snow takes the weight soon i’ll meet buddhas off my shoulders in the pure land no longer the story retold— do i fear the suffering being the workings at a dead end of karma saved for eternity safe in buddha’s arms through buddha’s power

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 70 this aging body i yearn running out of time to hear the music feeling the years in the pure land ticking away what a joy to nirvana it will be! so many i breathe in new friends i breathe out will i make my heart beats in amida’s my mind asks pure land! when will i be buddha? as a buddha even though by amida’s power my age-old karma i will truly fulfill has been severed the once impenetrable its remnants bodhisattva vow haunt me the great puzzle i have stopped of karma— beating myself up inscrutable— for past sins yet amida buddha has saved me worked it all out i worry no longer

Dharma food no good exceeds all i will need the buddha’s name as a buddha no evil can prevail in amida’s against it— pure land! in buddha’s name i trust what a tale to tell to the wondrous din how i came of all the buddhas to discover praising amida my way home and his name to amida buddha! i add my small voice even those death shall have who made me suffer no dominion— i will strive to save by amida’s vow once I’m a buddha it will vouchsafe in the pure land my buddhahood i wonder a reverie what will it be like quietly thinking to see on amida’s love through the eyes that embraces me of a buddha despite myself

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 71 the larger sutra i spend so much time writes of wonders foolishly in the pure land thinking of myself how i yearn thinking so little to see them firsthand! of others nearing when i my eighth decade become buddha yet even so i will understand an eternity awaits me perfectly in the pure land! today’s foolishness i make plans i gaze out yet uncertain on the drifting snow is the future— in the mirror nothing is assured my white hair except pure land birth! reminds me of my age we all shall die this foolish mind we all this aging body shall go somewhere so unfit but tell me for the mindfulness where will you go? of a buddha! akashic record i can but what a jumble dimly see of good and evil beyond this life karmic tracks to the buddhahood we leave behind that awaits me! when younger this ailing world i played will need with mysticism all the buddhas like a fool it can get with toys when the rent comes due i sing truly i am my gratitude a link among many to the buddha in amida’s golden chain for saving me that stretches where i ever failed across the cosmos! when i’m buddha amida’s light my karma tracks has many names will wash away amida’s light like sand castles saves innumerable in the surf suffering beings

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 72 i’m saved forever by amida buddha’s Dollar Store powerful vow powerful light Roary Williams powerful compassion! all i follow now barrio dollar store in the waning years on the fourth of July of my final life five kids with paletas are the dharma tracks and their mother with one to the pure land pressed to her forehead when i pass over the clocks standing at the door will keep on ticking in my white goatee but i will truly know the young guys call me timelessness old-timer and the old men call me young man amida my teacher my savior no one in the store my light on a hot July night my life the security guard goes outside to stand ~United States in the sudden downpour

Born in North Dakota in 1946, Richard St. Clair (Shaku Egen) is a everyone Shin Buddhist living in Massachusetts. In addition to being an at the store entrance accomplished poet he is a recognized composer of modern classical music, his work having been performed in Europe and North America. talking and smiling His haiku have been published in many print and online journals. He that one person bitching has also written many Western short forms of poetry such as sonnets, about the rain triolets, and cinquains. He has recently (2012) begun writing renku, and his work with other poets has been published in Frogpond. His hour-long Buddhist oratorio on ancient Buddhist texts, “Dharma Chant,” is scheduled for performance by Commonwealth Chorale (West a young woman Roxbury, Massachusetts) in the 2015-2016 concert season. dirty and sunburnt carrying a backpack way more human than I’ve ever seen

putting grocery bags in a two-wheeled cart the old veteran looks at me and tells himself about his day

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 73 security guard watches the old man stagger Robyn Cairns then leave without a word two bottles of mouthwash midnight— go back on the shelf a water rat writes poetry in moonlight ripples more animated of the river than anyone has a right to be the old black man laughing and hitting on the ladies in the quiet in the makeup aisle a tiny moth writes a poem on the green wall under the lamp homeless woman of painted roses brings her cart in the store then fills it up with things she can’t afford post hysterectomy just for the cool air i sit in winter sun and watch a tiny feather security guard drift slash bouncer slash babysitter slash therapist on the bench slash tired old poet watching the sun dip into the sea ~Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA sugar and salt on our lips Roary Williams lives in Albuquerque, NM, and is a micropoet who has been writing the Japanese forms for six years. He loves the mountains and deserts of the southwest, and studies zen and keeps always that moment ferrets to keep centered. of breathless anticipation top of the sandy track and then the sea

~Australia

Robyn is a Melbourne poet who also posts her poetry on twitter @robbiepoet. She loves writing poetry and is inspired by all around her especially nature.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 74 Possession What We Were

Ruth Holzer S. M. Abeles whatever we were altar boys became of so-and-so in the church of Garcia you wonder— a good-time god why would I keep track who let us partake of all your scattered lovers in the offerings

Skateland— over the years we were the ones we might have shared mother warned you about a few people— then looked over but none at the same time a beat too long that I am aware of for us, too it was about “the journey”— temptation ripping jeans or simple offer— on chain-linked fences trapped between on the way to Mickey D’s my refusal to yield and your sheer indifference in coats painted like album covers my brother and me you always knew bashed down the doors the best way to kill of the people trying to put us down a small animal— by standing on its heart the air thick in your thick-soled boots with cinnamon and first love town fair we were the runaways held fast left behind in your own embrace every night— laughing beneath now you are finally the same old clouds of smoke faithful to someone at the reunion we make peace with the fact ~United States we’ve wasted our lives

~West Orange, New Jersey, USA Ruth Holzer’s poetry has appeared previously in Atlas Poetica as well as in many journals and anthologies. She is currently one of the editors of Haibun Today.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 75 S. M. Abeles Spare Poem

Sandra Renew watching her squeeze the season’s first mango at the juice stand What work poems do in the fights for our I’m already freedoms. Their muscular words flex and push walking on water and lift to show approximations and possibilities for truths and lies and artful fabrications in love and politics and in the struggle to know things the diamond stud better. in her nose We should always keep a poem spare in case is a beacon, our working poetry becomes lost or broken or rescue me just plain worn out, an emergency poem ready to and I’m yours forever step into the gap so that the world is not left at any point without poetry. ~Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA spare poem conceived to cover lack inside this whirlwind how do we decide there’s a world, they tell me what opinion it would hold, I’m a boy this one spare, back-up poem? in a man’s body still looking for my dog ~Australia for now I’m passing the time with a morphine drip strung between my arm and your moon

~Alexandria, Virginia, USA in this great golden California dream I am summer and you’re Janis singing my song

~Northern California, USA

S. M. Abeles is just looking for his dog.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 76 Sandra Renew Untitled

Sanford Goldstein what must I do to quieten my mind? 1. it spins and spins I spin and spin dust rising About forty or fifty years ago, I wrote the clouding the light following tanka:

no causes trucks to uphold on the highway I sit sound squat like songs in the night write poems until we hear the sirens I am liberal and do not enter into any cause. All I do is zen sitting, use the toilet in the we understand war Japanese way of squatting, and write my tanka it’s in all our history poems. But last year I was in a peace march we yearn for peace against Japan’s present prime minister. I used a when all we do rehearses red whistle and repeated what the leader called us to kill . . . out. I did it for over an hour. ~Australia 2. In 2015 Sandra Renew has published poems in Flood, Fire and Drought edited by Suzanne Edgar, Kathleen Kituai, I did not enter this year’s peace march. It Sandra Renew and Hazel Hall 2015, an anthology exploring the effect of weather events on the Australian landscape showcasing the started from the famous Okura Hotel in Niigata. work of twenty-nine Australian poets with a foreward by Dr Richard I went into the hotel and ordered coffee and Denniss. Projected on the Wall poems by Sandra Renew, Ginninderra cheese cake. Fortunately, I could write my poems Press, Pocket Poets series, 2015. This is why, a chapbook of poems of protest by Sandra Renew, 2015. and read. The following tanka I like:

I sit in an elegant chair and wait for my friend to finish his his anti-war march

~Japan

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 77 the trail of a scam: a tanka In the bardo string Sonam Chhoki Sanford Goldstein In the precinct of the monastery you raise your eyes just as I look up. I sense a charge of such a long time karmic link. Amidst the juniper smoke, the chime before visiting this small of bronze votive bells and the chanting of monks, Japanese town. I touch and bless the heads of devotees who there we found the mother whose prostrate before me. But all the while, Oh! Buddhas daughter my friend suspected of scams of the Five Directions I search for the shy crease of your dark eyes. This burgundy robe, my monastic oath, my a terrible case shaven head and begging bowl bind me to the of kidneys gone wrong august seat of the Speech Incarnate of the late her arms bloated, Guru. You are betrothed to another. we learned without asking Your offerings of persimmons and guavas on that her daughter had scammed her the black lacquer tray by my throne glisten in the butter lamps and torment me. I rattle my prayer beads at the mosquitoes and my thoughts. Dawn we bought always comes before sleep. flowers for the gentle mother I’m in the bardo between you and my destined whose colours she loved, office. offering me money from her small purse, of course I refused and patted her hand tracery of trees darkening to ghosts at the edge of dusk . . . I sat for five hours I’m heartsick with doubt while my friend kept questioning love is a chimera that daughter about a scam, I liked her face and the way ~Thimphu, Bhutan she responded so energetically

Speech Incarnate: In Tibetan Buddhism when a ‘guru’ dies he can be lying about the hospital reborn in three incarnations: Body, Speech and Mind (The three basic her mother was in and still realities of the human condition). The incarnates often come from my friend found it, different families and regions. he made piles and piles Bardo: The bardo (BAR-DOOR) is the intermediate state between of notes that tell all death and a new rebirth in Tibetan Buddhist eschatology. It is a liminal state of being. ~Japan

Sanford Goldstein still lives in Japan. He will be 90 at the end of the year. He still continues to write tanka and to submit to various journals.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 78 Semtokha Dzong (“On the face daisies, dogs, and gods of the demoness” Monastery- Fortress) Sonam Chhoki

Sonam Chhoki My two year-old daughter scatters daisies into a puddle and asks, ‘will this grow?’ A stray dog who sleeps in the shade of our verandah Its lime-white walls straddle the face of a sidles up, sniffs and turns away. ‘He doesn’t like demoness and commemorate the slaying of flowers,’ she says. primal crime. An embodiment of Cosmic She can now walk without tiring easily. We triumph it still stands in its hallowed place but follow a row of weeping willows to the water’s little remains of the valley. The once glistening edge. Above the low gurgle of the narrow stream rice terraces are ploughed into memory and the we pick out the insistent drill of a woodpecker phantom past as highways and the Expressway that echoes in the trees. take shape and Thimphu sprouts concrete I put a finger to my lips and point out the mushrooms of houses and shops. bird to her. She watches intently. It saved us from the demons of our past but ‘Why does it bite? Doesn’t it like the tree?’ is now endangered by the impetuous haste of our she asks, her eyes dark with curiosity. future. Later that year she loses her first milk tooth. We throw some rice grains and an old copper cold transparency coin onto the roof to tell the family gods of her of raindrops in yellow chalices coming of age. of late lilies . . . praying seems New year festival— a parody of hope amidst the chant of monks and clang of cymbals ~Thimphu, Bhutan the toddler incarnate asleep in his mother’s lap

According to Bhutanese oral traditions a flesh-eating demoness lived in the valley where Semtokha monastery-fortress stands. She was subdued ~Thimphu, Bhutan by the Divine Madman, Drukpa Kunley (1455–1529) who then built the monastery-fortress (Dzong Pron: ZONG) to commemorate the victory of Buddhist teachings.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 79 Impulsion of Life Vocabulary of Regret

Sonam Chhoki Sonam Chhoki

First night home from hospital. It is as if I have woken from another world. Sleep seems a They say the present is phantomed by the waste. The spring full moon rises in a membrane past in fragments of things. I was once a creature of incandescent clouds. It is lighter outside the of your intent trapped in your dream. You said house. I put on my coat and walk to the orchard. you hear the rhythm of the wind in the beat of Against still bare apple trees the plum blossoms your heart. I still hear it as the music of your are a haze of white. Old prayer flag poles stipple malice. the frost-covered grass. A stirring of wings in the dark interstices of the bamboos. Bats flit in another year ends . . . patches of shadow. it’s hard to remember I look back at the house. The door is in half- what we last said light. Frost on the roof tiles catches the light of even harder to imagine the moon. The chimney points a dark finger as if we’ll ever speak again searching for wan stars. A motorbike revs. Its roar shatters the quiet of ~Thimphu, Bhutan the valley.

what can it mean Born and raised in Bhutan, Sonam Chhoki is inspired by her father, this wakeful longing Sonam Gyamtsho, the architect of Bhutan’s non-monastic modern to belly the ground education. Her tanka has been published in journals and anthologies in Australia, Canada, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, UK, and US and for the dew’s eye view included in the Cultural Olympics 2012 Poetry Parnassus and BBC of rival stars Radio Scotland Written Word program. She is the current haibun and senryu editor of the UHTS journal, cattails. ~Thimphu, Bhutan

Stephen Galiani was born in The Bronx, New York; now resides in Un-worded offering San Rafael, California. Education: M.F.A. in Writing, University of San Francisco (2013); M.A. in Humanities, Dominican University of California (2009); M.B.A. in Finance, Boston University (1975); Sonam Chhoki B.A. in English, Manhattan College (1967). Prior occupations: vagabond, social worker, investment manager. Current occupations: poet, teacher, student. Avocations: theatre, percussion & back-up vocals, It seems I’m only leaning on the edge of life. travel, wine. His short fiction and poetry has appeared in a variety of Like the fluttering of an unseasonal moth the small press publications. ghost of grief makes a dark passage across my window. Stephen Toft was born in Hampshire in 1980 and grew up near a huddle of stars Swansea, UK. He currently lives close to the River Lune in Lancaster, UK, with his girlfriend and their children. For the last 8 years Stephen in the cold hollow of night has worked with adults with disabilities and mental health issues. His I cry poetry has appeared in a variety of international journals and towards a future anthologies, and in 2008 Red Moon Press published his first haiku collection, the kissing bridge. without goodbyes

~Darjeeling, India, June, 2011

Night of the cremation rites of my brother, who died in his sleep, aged 34.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 80 Stephen Galiani Stephen Toft hillside of breeze-swept trees kissing frames a variegated valley the freckles my perfect vantage on her back— everything to see a map of nothing to do unknown stars far too many years snowmelt my daily commute in the evening sun the ferry glides into Drake’s cove what’s left now commuters wave of a mountaineer’s to me and my dog dreams

~Chamonix, France I trek Marin’s maze of hill-wrapping trails destination unknown chapel ruins a vulture floats sideways I fall to one knee carried by the wind stretch out my arms and open my palms to the rain sitting at my desk viewing the tree out my window ~Bishop’s Wood, Swansea, UK nothing to write about except sitting at my desk watching the tree out my window the drunk old sailor leans closer and tells me creek-side stroll that he only knows one knot birds hills trees sky but it’s a fucking strong one a fresh view daily every morning ~Mumbles, Swansea, UK can be a rebirth

~Marin County, California,United States the things I’ve learned since your passing— like the surprising weight of a cloud

~Lancaster, UK

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 81 To Believe Stephanie Brennan

Stephanie Brennan in the vineyard when green grapes bruise purple 7 a.m. I’m standing in line for coffee in the the white feral cat hotel lobby. This is no ordinary lobby. A retracts his claws cathedral-like ceiling soars two stories overhead. At one end, a massive wall of glass frames a in the vineyard panorama captured on canvas countless times. plump grapes pulse The window glass is dusty, pocked with dried showing their sugar content raindrops. But it does not dampen the view. It like teenage girls gives me vertigo. This scene, it sails across the with newfound cleavage green of Willow Flats to those rugged masterpieces of volcanic activity, the Grand in the vineyard Tetons. For most of my life I have shunned what the white feral cat churchgoers would call religion. I think now, slinks by the stone cairn gaping at the jagged peaks, that if I could gaze my niece built upon this view for even one more day, I might in his honor discover a belief in God. in the vineyard a belief rises the white feral cat was it always there? chases moonlight an ascent to the mountaintop while in the kitchen I stand in line she mops up spilled milk to scale the heights of conviction hunting alone ~Grand Tetons, Wyoming, USA the white feral cat expands his territory like teenage boys copping a feel

on the run the white feral cat halts the timbre of my voice deceptively familiar

this moonless night the white feral cat a crescent among the vines hunting, always hunting

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 82 uprooted two sweethearts the old vines wither carve their initials in the dust on forearms the long drought amid soft pale hair of unremembered memories and scars, so many scars woozy in the gazebo from a splash the flamenco dancer of dandelion wine creates a tumult I lose the thread in her red, red dress she sings that binds me to death take me to church, take me to church late at night the bartender says I think I know live it up, baby the names dump the slacker of all the wild dogs dance the tango crying me to sleep buy yourself an island beneath her canopy neon blue the mimosa tree some cocktail or other sings to the birds piano-player fingers while beneath the sheet caress the stemware I wail and thrash her nonchalance, tedious on this night was I? when the stars refuse us too drunk last night we lament to sing we took for granted you to sleep those bursts of joy was I? drowsy in a sense are the chubby honeybees she feels the weight laden with the minutiae of the past of marigolds resurface and sugar snap peas like a bloated corpse I overheard the rain whispering innuendoes lilacs I believe in her dream in the rescue become grenades of bumblebees sweetly scented with regret white lie his moral compass askew hey, she says ripe apples fall her blue eyes pleading through the hole buy me a drink in his wet paper bag her halter top unknots in the knick of time ~Wine Country, Sonoma County, California, USA

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 83 mama’s boys in the plaza in the surf their hair too long the sun plays tricks oozing sparks fly arrogance the octopus was once alive and otherworldly charm but now belongs to the gulls little thief ~Fort Ross, California, USA the puppy steals the ball from the old cat my father, long dead only May visits me in the night and the June bugs kamikaze what day is it into the flame when the horses like so many lovers are restless this infernal noise and the neighbors rotating saw blades assemble at the gate whine the dogs at my heels late at night undisciplined when the jasmine goes online in the torrid heat I listen to the mice he plants rice moving behind the walls while the geckos sit idle waiting, always waiting all night for the industry of ants I endure these thoughts in the half-light ~Nosara, Costa Rica as the moon slides down the wall the pink peonies Sedoka I’ll have those, she says not looking at the florist Stephanie Brennan but behind her in the mirror when it rains she never listens his lie she runs for cover whitewashed by time missing resurfaces the toucan’s laugh in a brown face in the cloudburst and the glare of dark brown eyes ~Nosara, Costa Rica

~Sebastopol, California, USA Stephanie Brennan lives among the redwoods and fog in Sebastopol, Sonoma County, California. She’s been writing fiction for many years, some of which may be found online at: People Do Things With Their Lives. She ventured into poetry having fallen in love with the tanka and haiku writers on Twitter. She finds the online community of poets an invaluable resource for learning and support. Her recent publication credits include: Bright Stars 1, 2, 5 & 6.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 84 Dr Tim Gardiner is an ecologist and poet from Manningtree in Essex, The Winter Garden UK. His haiku and tanka have been published in literary magazines including Acorn, Blithe Spirit, Frogpond and Skylark while longer poems have appeared in Poetry Quarterly and The Seventh Quarry. His Tim Gardiner first collection of poetry, Wilderness, was published by Brambleby Books in 2015. He has published many scientific papers on natural history and several books, including one about glow-worms. an old friend wears a blank expression in the arcade booth— At the Grounds of the peacock butterfly Remembrance trapped behind glass lovers stroll Tish Davis hand in hand under bingo lights Not far from a stream and in a long line at fishermen count the copper-clad Loggia that features the last two meteors over the pier verses of Emerson’s “Concord Hymn.”

I stare through our flag the Winter Garden’s aloft and free cracked panes all of us forked lightning trying so hard far out to sea not to crunch the pea gravel ascending slowly ~Dublin Veterans Park, Dublin, Ohio, USA up the first incline of the roller coaster I feel a chill wind from childhood August Night the ghost train Tish Davis offers brief respite from summer rain The humid air petrifies my body with a the darkness inside stillness that hangs heavy as I spend my first night all consuming in what was once the maid’s apartment on the larking around third floor of this rundown lakefront home. in funhouse mirrors a lonely boy laughs the thud imperfections of a gull against my door, so clearly seen the landlord’s dog digging in the sand─ ~England something the lake wants to whisper

A tanka sequence about the coastal town of Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, England. My hometown is in serious decline, formerly a ~Lorain, Ohio, USA popular tourist resort in the Victorian era with an important fishing industry and port. The town is now renowned for its numerous seafront Tish Davis lives in Concord, Ohio, USA. Her work has appeared in amusement arcades, derelict Winter Garden, piers and Pleasure Beach numerous journals including Modern Haibun and Tanka Prose, Atlas with wooden roller coaster, funhouse and ghost train. Poetica, Haibun Today, red lights, Skylark, Modern Haiku, Frogpond, Presence, bottle rockets, Contemporary Haibun Online, and Simply Haiku.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 85 Peace Traci Siler

with what Tracy Davidson can I wager these poems She speaks of the good times among the dripping hardships, the camaraderie of women. How their with silvered breaths laughter and mutual support saw them through. How their voices, so long ignored, were finally ~Carrollton, Texas, USA heard.

my mother Swing of Death camped at Greenham Common promoting peace Vasile Moldovan now her doctors wage war in radiology Siesta time. I’m so tired and wish to rest at least a half hour but I can’t. Not yet, because two ~United Kingdom flies are flying one after another. Their flight is very, very noisy. Curious to see what they are up to, I concern myself with their job. Indeed, is it a fight or only play? Neither. After a while I observe that this bolt is their nuptial flight. Black Marks All of a sudden the buzz of the two flies takes dramatic accents. Of course, something is Tracy Davidson happening. I take some steps toward the corner from where I heard that hullabaloo. So I can see The old man shakes his head as he listens to what happened. Unfortunately the two flies in the children complain about their teachers. love fell into a cobweb. They writhe in the greasy Detention and extra homework do not sound so web which adheres to their wings and legs. bad. He closes his eyes and remembers the sisters Probably they did not see the huge cobweb and their habits . . . because they were fumbling. The great love was the reason for this temporary dazzle. my grandfather I am powerless at their agony because the speaks of school discipline spider contaminated both of their bodies in no in the forties . . . time, but forever and a day. Under the double the crack of a nun’s ruler turmoil, the cobweb is moving, here and there, against a child’s funny bone up and down, just like a swing:

~United Kingdom swing of death— two flies in love Tracy Davidson lives in Warwickshire, England, and writes poetry and jump together flash fiction. Her work has appeared in various publications and in the unseen web anthologies, including: Modern Haiku, A Hundred Gourds, Ribbons, The Heron’s Nest, Haiku Presence, Poet’s Market 2015, Mslexia, of a black spider The Binnacle, Journey to Crone, The Great Gatsby Anthology and In Protest: 150 Poems for Human Rights. ~Romania

Traci Siler’s short form poems have appeared in The Bamboo Hut, Vasile Moldovan was born in 1949 in Romania. He was co-founder The Best of Mijikai Haiku, Moonbathing, Prune Juice, Bright Stars, (1991) and chairman of the Romanian Society of Haiku and Gems. She is the author of two small poetry books, Beneath a (2001-2009). He has published haiku, senryu, tanka and renku in Morphine Moon and DEMLIPS. magazines around the world..

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 86 Notes for a Theory of Tanka attention to the “corporeality” of words, and the patterning of verbal artifacts. The Prose: Ekphrasis and Abstract ekphrastic image acts, in other words, like a Art sort of unapproachable and unpresentable “black hole” in the verbal structure, entirely absent from it, but shaping and affecting it in Charles D. Tarlton fundamental ways.2 1 Whatever else the ekphrastic poet may seek . . .the desultory story of what the poet thinks and to do, then, she/he must work to bring the feels as he contemplates the painting. painting into the poem, so to speak, recognizing —James A. W. Heffernan that this is not literally possible with words alone. One may still explore the objects in the painting, Ekphrasis is not easy to pin down. Some recovering a feasible version of the narrative have defined it simply as the poetic encounter there, but always in such ways as to induce an with art (painting),1 in many cases taking that intuition of the represented in the mind’s eye of encounter to be antagonistic or a struggle for the reader. The saliency of this demand can supremacy, while others have defined the easily be seen by simply imagining that the ekphrastic poem as merely descriptive of the painting in question is not some wholly familiar subject-matter represented in the painting. The painting like the Mona Lisa, that everyone knows widespread tendency in contemporary ekphrasis by name, but some wholly unfamiliar painting in has been to focus on the poet’s side, defining an unknown style, or even an imaginary one. ekphrasis in terms of the poet’s analytical or Part of the charm of ekphrasis derives emotional reaction. These foci are possible ironically from just this ultimately practical mainly because most ekphrastic poetry is written impossibility; the physical experience of viewing about figurative paintings of recognizable things a painting cannot be displaced by mere words. or persons, and such paintings come with a Visually, an apple, say, presents an incalculable narrative already attached in some way. The number of possible visual experiences that the ekphrastic poet joins immediately in discourse brain sorts and abbreviates, but which words with the work and its story and, by implication, cannot exactly encompass. With a painting of the its painter and his/her intentions. apple (even in the hands of a master of trompe But, there is another view, one first l’oeil) these imagined but endless aspects are recognized by W. J. T. Mitchell, that states that crudely caught by brush and paint, frozen in an while presenting the painting is ekphrasis’ illusion at yet another remove. The marks on the principal task and while the ekphrastic poem canvas, the angle and distance of our cannot make the painting literally present (an perceptions, the light, and the cultural ideal but unattainable goal made even more conventions of viewing paintings create an difficult because the paintings depicted and entirely different visual experience—impression discussed are imaginary), what the poet can do is of a real apple—even when the curious eye attempt to present the painting (which is actually cannot help but burst the illusion by slipping off absent) as a virtual presence, an evocation or its focus onto the streaks and scratches in the bits insinuation of solidity conjured up by the poem. of different colored oil or the stringy texture of the brush strokes. This “solidity” is exemplified in such features as descriptive vividness and particularity,

1 Throughout this paper the art component of ekphrasis will be taken to be painting.

2 W. J. T. Mitchell. Ekphrasis and the Other.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 87 Which is why so many critics of abstract art ekphrastic poet, working with verse alone (verse would prefer to keep trying to talk about it as if it here referring to writing constructed around were no different, fundamentally, from figurative rhythmic, musical form, metaphorical art, just somehow more stylized or distorted. representation, and indirection), this complex can Such critics weirdly keep looking for the real often seem out of balance, the sentiments objects or phenomena surreptitiously portrayed expressed appearing odd or excessive for lack of under the abstractions (what’s really behind them a vivid object before the mind of the reader. or posing as them or in them), finding traces of This question comes up over and over: why sunshine or apples or (even more arbitrarily) the can’t ekphrasis simply be any poem about a direct expression of emotions in the paint. The painting? You have only to imagine a prohibition phenomenological fact is, by the bye, that we against naming paintings in the poems would actually do better as pure ekphrasists if we somewhere or against publishing reproductions looked beyond or under the visual illusions to alongside them, to appreciate the hopeless understand the play of paint on its flat surface irrelevance of much ekphrastic poetry. Somehow, even in figurative paintings. and this has become more generally recognized, So, if we rule out discovering disguised at least among ekphrasis theorists, the painting subject-matter as the way to the deeper truth of must come into the reader’s imagination qua the abstract painter, we are left only with the painting, a physical thing of color and form, surface of the canvas, the composition of colors, which, if it can’t literally be seen, can be shapes, line, and textures. With no apparent imagined to be seen. “meaning,” the abstract painting presents the Standing before the painting, the poet looks, ekphrastic poet with special problems. Consider sees, and then, trying to record, salvage what has any abstract painting and you can’t help (or if been seen; but immediately it begins to slip and that’s not true, then with a little help) imagine the fade, losing detail after detail, until only the painter reaching, judging, moving, reflecting, memory of a memory of having recorded changing, mixing, scraping, brushing, and so on. something remains. The poetry enters here, just If the abstract painting gives expression to when all the vivid visual images are being lost. something, the question is to what? There have What is there to say now, to recall? A vague been many suggestions as to what the abstract recollection of color, a general sense of shapes painting expresses, such as the artist’s inner state, (round or square, blurred or clear), and the the body’s motions in making the painting, or remembered effort to uncover something, something that, more simply, knows no other anything, recognizable—an apple, a star, a field instantiation than it has received in the of grain, a beach. So the poet must invent (on the physicality of the inarticulate mixtures of strength of a fading memory and as fast as pigment. possible because it is fading all the time) a verbal work of art to represent an original object known 2 now only in the scattered threads and motes of some half-remembered thought. Art with any serious aspirations toward realism still The difficulty really is to portray in the static has to take into account the fact that reality escapes laws present-ness of a poem the drawn-out, tenuous, of perspective and logic, and does not naturally take the fragmented, forgetful, circulating, and puzzling form of a sonnet or a sonata.—John Ashbery process of viewing a painting. At the end of trying unsuccessfully (as it must be every time, of The natural gulf between words and images course) to encompass the painting before us, the is crucial. If the ekphrastic poem cannot really ekphrastic impulse nevertheless drives us to replicate the painted picture, what is its purpose? “recreate” both the work and our response in To stimulate the reader to imagine the painting, I words. would argue, and at the same time recognize the difficulty of doing so. For the traditional

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 88 3 are no conventional names for the figures painted there; evidence of a single brushstroke is as [T]he reader of much ekphrastic poetry and criticism significant as the largest formal gesture. could be forgiven for thinking that painting had remained The ekphrastic poet hesitates before such a unchanged since the Renaissance. task. Describing the abstract painting in poetry —David Kennedy will of necessity force the poet to shift away from habitual tone, rhythm, and delicate allusion to Very little of contemporary ekphrasis deals become starkly prosaic. Abstract painting is, in with abstract art.3 The obvious reason, of course, this sense, anti-poetic: to draw the reader to an is that the abstract composition contains no intuition of an abstract painting (something by convenient narrative, no recognizable objects, no Agnes Martin, Richard Diebenkorn, or people, and no lexicon with which to translate it. Mondrian) the ekphrastic poet has to put aside Nevertheless, when poets encounter abstract song and take out chain, transit, and T-square. paintings they routinely tend to search for meaning in the ordinary ways, decoding the 4 unconventional and unrecognizable lines, shapes and colors as if they were stand-ins for sorrow, The poem must convert the transparency of its verbal for trees and the ocean and the sky. They believe, medium into the physical solidity of the medium of the perhaps, that the history of painting spatial arts.—Murray Krieger (Impressionism to post-Impressionism to Expressionism to Abstract Expressionism?) is Most “ekphrastic” poetry does little more nothing more than the gradual elimination of a than record the poet’s emotional reaction to a clear focus. painting or invite us to imagine eccentric contexts Problems arise when the purpose of the in which to understand the painting’s implied ekphrastic poet is to describe the abstract work in story. The core of ekphrasis, however, lies question. In the conventional figurative painting somewhere else. If we go back to Homer’s the artifice of pictorial representation is used to originating text, Achilles’ Shield, the defining effect create the visual illusion of things in the world, of the elements of story as well as the profusion and this allows the poet merely to point out the of visual images there is to make us feel the drama or tableau arising in the canvas. From the forged, metallic presence of that shield; the word tree in the poem, the reader imagines a pounded object arises in the poem as a thing of tree, but the abstract painting is not the picture of overwhelming possibility. anything else. A flat surface covered with black rectangles and ovoid shapes or carefully arranged In hissing flames huge silver bars are roll’d, and repetitious grids do not represent cathedrals, And stubborn brass, and tin, and solid gold; horses, or a boat. Nor are they puzzles for which Before, deep fix’d, the eternal anvils stand; we must guess the solution. The ponderous hammer loads his better hand, For exactly the reason that there are no His left with tongs turns the vex’d metal round, ocean waves or desert buttes in the abstract And thick, strong strokes, the doubling vaults painting, the attempt to describe such a painting rebound. is endless. Name the object in a figurative work and the simplifying power of language takes —Homer, Illiad, Book XVIII charge; readers can form images of things in their own minds. But try to describe an abstract It seems real though we never see it. painting, and there is no end to it because there

3 Some notable exceptions to this rule are Jorie Graham’s “Pollock and Canvas,” from The End of Beauty and Sharon Dolin’s ekphrastic poems on Richard Diebenkorn and Joan Mitchell in her book Serious Pink.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 89 But, what about accompanying blotting, and other techniques registering the reproductions, someone asks? Don’t they bring artists’ frustration and inspiration are visible on the painting into the poem? Perhaps the time will the canvas. These pentimenti (e.g., traces of come when vivid reproductions of all art work is previous painting still visible in the layers) reveal universally available, but then something very the painter’s process (I almost said progress). different from ekphrasis will likely define their Following the cues revealed there allows us to relation to poetry. Of course, no poem can imagine the work coming into being. The perfectly recreate a painting in words; that was abstract painting reveals its own creation through never the point of ekphrasis. The ekphrastic time, its stages are visible on the canvas, and by poem struggles to bridge the gap that defines the describing and manifesting these the ekphrastic ekphrastic experience, which is the too solid poet has a firm footing on which to perform the viewer before the too mute painting. Vivid magic of making us “see” the stratigraphy of the recreation of the painting remains the goal, painting. bringing the painting over and into the mind. Even though it is not possible to translate the There are shortcuts, of course, for the traditional markings of an abstract painting as one might figurative painting; we recognize a cow of sorts recognize the familiar objects in a still life or just hearing the word—cow. But there are no landscape, it is still possible to track the evidence such shortcuts for the abstract painting—only of their creation and to see just where the painter description, and afterwards, perhaps, had made determinations about color, shape, explorations of mood and association. position, tone, weight, balance, composition, and the like. Such tracking is probably a task more 5 like geographical mapping or reading a mechanical drawing than searching for the right The contemporary painterly poem shares many of the metaphor (although it must sometimes be like characteristics of it predecessors of the seventeenth and that, too) or catching a sensitive feeling in flight. eighteenth-centuries, but with a strong emphasis on its You wouldn’t want poetry or rhetoric to get in ability to embody the painting’s formal strategies and with the way; the most direct and unambiguous less emphasis on its mimetic potential. descriptions would be best. Of course, once the —Michael Davidson painting had been transported in this way into the poem, then the heart’s encounter with the Visualizing the modern abstract painting in painting would require the more vehement words requires more than merely describing trajectories of lyric verse. surface features of the canvas. There are, by and large, no conventional names for most of the 6 effects achieved in a painting by any of the Abstract Expressionists, for example, so Tanka is always written in the present tense, and descriptions necessarily remain visually aims to capture a single moment in time. It’s a starting uncertain. One possibility for conjuring up the point that forces you to find the most succinct way to distinctive physicality of such paintings (which convey a simple snippet of life in an evocative manner. are often referred to as “action” or “gestural” There are infinite possibilities within its structure . . .. paintings) is to recreate in words the process of —Laura Maffei their production. Typically (that is, true for many but not all), the Abstract Expressionist “method” Few would take exception to the above began with what Richard Diebenkorn referred to description of tanka as a poetic form; if anything, as “besmirching” and Robert Motherwell called the wider practice of tanka-writing has turned to “doodling or scribbling,” which created the an even more bijou form than Maffei suggests. painter’s problem on the canvas and set in Here, for example, is a prize-winning tanka by a motion a process of problem-solving. Trial and widely-known practitioner, Beverley George: error, painting over, erasing, scraping, rubbing,

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 90 rip-tide— to the painting itself, but if you didn’t already slowly I return know the picture or have a reproduction of it at an occupied shell hand, these phrases might very well refer to a to the surging sea living person (or a kitten) or would convey between us nothing at all. Somehow, as I keep saying, ekphrastic poetry must draw the plastic artwork And another “minimalist tanka” by the into view or else all we can mean by ekphrasis is master—Sanford Goldstein. poetry written by a poet maybe with a painting in mind. my kid Here is another example from the same carrying it source, this one by Chen-ou Liu concerned with home, Edward Munch’s Scream: her lopsided heart alone at twilight doing tonglen practice In terms of length (19 syllables, for George, I see the face scarcely longer than a haiku, and only 12 for in The Scream Goldstein, not as many as a haiku) and scope, it . . . and mine overlapping is hard to imagine these as compelling instruments for ekphrasis. The poems, of Again, whether you enjoy this tanka or not, it necessity, hardly get going when they come to an is clearly about the poet and not the painting. If end. Tanka is, of course, a powerful instrument you did not already know the painting, this tanka for catching the tiny edges of an emotion, seeing would indeed be puzzling. to the deepest heart of a sunset, or recording a Here is a final example of ekphrasis in a sudden vision. But, they are simply too brief and single tanka: this one is by Grant Savage, also too elliptical to bear the weight of a serious from Atlas Poetica. ekphrastic encounter. Moreover, tanka by themselves restrict the waiting room ekphrastic to intimations of the emotions of the the thousand sporting naiads poet and make it difficult if not impossible to of my schizophrenia convey a clear sense of a painting being as if by magic considered. As a preliminary foray, I want to look from Monet’s Water Lilies at a selection of tanka from the Ekphrastic Tanka feature, edited by Patricia Prime, that appeared The main thing to notice about this poem is in Atlas Poetica. that beyond mentioning Water Lilies by name (not The first is a tanka by Tracy Davidson on the alerting us that there were at least 250 water lily Mona Lisa: paintings by Monet), it has nothing whatever to do with a painting. It is a poem entirely about the what secrets hide poet’s psychologically induced reverie while behind those hooded eyes looking at the Monet. In the case of this single, that pale countenance stand-alone tanka (and this is crucial) we have no did you dare dream your fame idea whatsoever about the painting itself. It would last for centuries would be impossible, in the case of this single tanka (moving as it is) to know even that it was I would observe, first, that nothing besides about a painting at all, let alone one of the Water the poet’s sentiment about Da Vinci’s painting Lilies, if we were not told. This same debility, I has been conveyed. The “hooded eyes” and would argue, undermines all the ekphrastic tanka “pale countenance” are the only direct references in the Atlas Poetica feature; without specific

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 91 reference to or reproduction of the art the poet patterns, vertical and horizontal stripes rendered had in mind, none of these tanka could easily be in vibrant saturated hues—pigments chosen for recognized as ekphrasis at all. their emotive source of colour rather than to I do not mean to criticize these tanka; they express the intended scene. . . are fine enough in themselves, but ekphrasis is not merely synonymous with poetry itself; there is looking back the integral necessity of the plastic art as part of from the depths it. Brief allusions to well-known paintings by of the mirror name will not do. The emphasis on the poet’s her image inner state must be augmented by creation of a as an old woman real presence of the painting in question. hard, angular features framed in sombre colour 7 nature’s reminder that time ages Beyond that opportunity, however, tanka prose all lovely things promises to reclaim tanka’s venerable past, for tanka came to maturity with its prose accompaniment, whether in the This illustrates much of what I have been form of a memoir or a romance, a poem-tale or a military saying. The prose section presents the viewer’s chronicle.—Jeffrey Woodward experience of the painting, a description of its major features, together, crucially, with this Tanka prose (as an instance of prosimetrum) gesture toward the imagined method of its provides an unmatched instrument for ekphrastic making: writing, superior in this regard to verse (or tanka) alone. It is crucial to understand the operative . . . rendered in vibrant saturated hues— differences between the prose and verse elements pigments chosen for their emotive source of of tanka prose (apprehended as a single poetic colour rather than to express the intended form) in respect of what they can and cannot scene contribute to ekphrasis, each taking up different Now, of course, this prose does not fully parts of the enterprise. The prose allows direct, “render” Picasso’s painting, but it does convey express, and complicated descriptions of visual the facticity of it into the poem, keeping it and narrative experience; the verse is able to present. body forth emotional responses, and to bridge, General discussion of the point I am trying via its metaphors and imagery, between the to make can only carry us so far. I would ask you worlds of the visual and the verbal, the present to consider for a moment one last (and the and the absent. The prose and tanka can be ekphrastically strongest) tanka from the Atlas further distinguished in ways analogous to realis Poetica issue; Naomi Beth Wakan’s tanka on and irrealis moods—the verse performing as Kandinsky’s First Abstract. subjunctive (in a subordinate clause) to the prose’s indicative (in an independent clause) of an a child’s smudges with idealized English sentence. the sophistication of placement Here, for example, taken from the internet, is that only comes an ekphrastic tanka prose by Mary Mageau with years of careful looking based on Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror:4 years of slowly removing the subject . . . young and beautiful, her arms cradle a large oval mirror as she gazes at her reflection, Now, what happens if we append a prefatory surrounded by bold diamond shaped geometric prose passage to this tanka, creating a tanka prose

4 Mageau, Mary. Art and Nature as Inspiration. 9 April 2014. Accessed 9 September 2015.

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 92 designed to help bring the look and feel of particular trees, rivers, skies, clouds, people, and Kandinsky’s painting into the poem? so forth. They are even less useful for rendering the non-representational swirls, swatches, Against a pale background, a flurry of smudges, blurs, layers, patterns, shapes, washes irregular shapes swim like nothing we’ve seen and stripes of an abstract painting or to indicate before; are they the wild discoveries of a new the exact processes by which we can imagine a Zoology, a fantasia under the microscope. You non-figurative painting coming into being. The can feel the painter’s impulse, see where the demands of purely poetic form, the music, the brush pushed around, stopped, dipped back into indirection, word-play, allusive and metaphorical the watercolor, then drew a clear line, where it propensities keep it, as it were, at arm’s length. wiggled, where it blurred, and where the Thus, ekphrastic poets are more often than not penciled outlines were barely filled with colored driven to shift attention away from the literal wash. It is excited; it is moving quickly. A black content or other specific descriptions of the smear repeats itself and an intricate red drawing, painting under consideration and focus on their small and assertive, wrestles for central position. own feelings about it or arising from it. Very often there is no effort at all to depict the painting a child’s smudges with in ways that readers might distinguish it from any the sophistication of placement other painting, even in their imaginations. that only comes Ekphrastic poetry, to quote James with years of careful looking Heffernan’s dictum, ought to be the “verbal years of slowly removing the subject representation of a visual representation.” Don’t we have to take the “verbal representation” I suppose it’s not really a question whether aspect to include crucially allusion, metaphor, words can take the place of the painting in the allegory and other non-literal poetic depictions? sense of making us really see the exact picture in The ekphrastic poem qua poem must always be a the mind’s eye; the very possibility of that has little askew or tangential to the painting before it. been disputed since the Greeks. But, what the Because of its double-ness, tanka prose, as we prose does is evoke the presence and dynamic of have seen, is the perfect instrument for ekphrasis, a real painting and helps us to visualize allowing straightforward descriptions not something to reflect that. And the prose can normally available within the strictures of verse roughly pluck details from the visual object, (and even the simple poetic form of tanka has it details that help us entertain the intuition of a sstructural, topical, and spiritual rules). Speaking real painting (even, ironically, when there is none, now only of abstract painting, the surface of the as when the ekphrasis invents one for its own canvas can be described in detail, allowing the purposes). The prose tries to drag suggestive reader something closer to an actual (albeit evidence of a concrete artwork back across the imaginary) viewing. barrier between what we can hear and what we Adding the tanka, then, gives full sway to the can “see” metaphorically. poet’s feeling about the painting brought onto the stage by the prose, what it suggests and promises, 8 its associations and moods. But, wait. Now there are two elements at work; the tanka ricochets off the quick sleeved the prose, the prose persists and enriches the transparency of light verse, and the two together make it possible to dividing two worlds achieve a truly ekphrastic experience, and one in —Patricia Prime which the painting itself is not lost. What I mean is the painting stays in the ekphrastic poem along Strictly speaking, of course, verse forms are with the poet’s sensibilities. inadequate to describe fully the figures and narrative of even a representational painting, its

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 93 Ekphrasis, as I have said and repeated, is if he’d cut a window double (the painting and the viewer); but, so is we’d be looking for a roof the tanka prose. Ekphrasis is weakened by writing in to cast its shadow which the painting under view is allowed to fade or even like an oak over a farmhouse disappear in favor of expressions of the poet’s desire and somewhere in painter’s country feelings. Feelings in the absence of the stimulus that gives rise to them are only half present, An intricate grouping of carefully executed however, and thus the opportunity provided by geometric shapes fitted into the limited space of a the necessity of the prose of tanka prose to direct canvas implies, I grant you, deliberateness and, and focus tanka’s power to depict emotion and perhaps, even meaning. The more so when, in insight. one quadrant, the corners of eleven assorted polygons of different sizes come neatly together. 9 Being executed and arranged with such care, they might, indeed, be representations of The painter called his “crudities” something. Ah, but what? uncertain stumblings others call regrets no blues, this is dirt and tuck away painting in the colors of mud —Sharon Dolin remembering from Euclid Here in the final section and by way of a tiny wires connecting this conclusion (and to make my point more to higher celestial harmonies concretely) I want to present an ekphrastic tanka prose concerned with Richard Diebenkorn’s yes, yes, so you say Ocean Park #90. but what does it really mean? then someone said it Proof makes you look inwardly deeper than you can touch Let AB designate a line from one end of a canvas to the other; draw another line that’s The truths of mathematics are perfectly true. shorter, and then others that are shorter still, all They are analytic and a priori, matters of up and down, all parallel. Then come at those definition. “Let ABC be a right-angled triangle lines with other now rigidly perpendicular lines, having the angle BAC right. I say that the square lines across, lines at right angles to those, and on BC equals the sum of the squares on BA and then, for no apparent reason, three lines, all AC.” You don’t even have to see it to know it is within the boundary, parallel to each other and true. at some angle (I’m guessing 23°). I count sixty- two enclosed plane figures, more or less, all in puts us nearer colors from the red-yellow segment of the discovering what is being spectrum. And, oh, yes, flick a brush load of said in paint language black or blue there, let it start to dry, and then go what’s the difference between over it with gold wash. brown yellow, yellow red?

none of them have names what if there was these Ocean Parks, so no help there a form of synesthesia still they might be turning colors into words pictures of something, don’t we could sit down then and read you think, all those figures? it off: “Dick, Jane, and Sally”

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 94 The longer I look at it, the muter I am struck. I see myself on the outside looking in, Review: Moonbathing : a journal asking what does that say about me? Do these of women’s tanka forms mirror my brainscape, do they bare the circuitry of my ideas? I search into the corners and gather threads of insight in the architecture Reviewed by Patricia Prime of it. Down in the bottom, though, is only rest, Moonbathing: a journal of women’s tanka the fullness of a dreamless night. And, there’s the Issue 12 Spring/Summer 2015 perfection in it . . .. Edited by Pamela A. Babusci. Pb. 23 pp. Deadline for Spring/Summer: May 15 and Fall/ no need to trouble Winter: Nov. 15. what is or is not a tree Send to [email protected] trapezoids are Price: USA/Canada: $12 for two issues; USA easier to define and draw cash/check or MO and always—lineal International: $16 for two issues Paypal accepted add $2 to cover PP costs I dream of making it myself, my long straight edge The tanka in Moonbathing comes from women surrounded by pots in many parts of the world: USA, Canada, of earthy mixtures, flattened tubes Australia, New Zealand, Romania and Japan. burnt umber, the cadmiums The poems are spaced out four per page, with plenty of space around them. cartographie The first tanka in this issue is the prize- winner of the Sixth Annual Moonbathing find coordinates Contest, Jenny Fraser of New Zealand, with the on first principles, use tanka: peg and rope geometry to establish your baseline white winter moments then draw frequent yellow offsets blossoming under straightening curvature a moonless sky . . . to its right angles, long lines the silence of stars reaching into it flattening the circular The final tanka in this issue honours a abhorring all that’s round contemporary tanka poet, Fumiko Nakajo, whose poem is taken from Breasts of Snow by Hatsue Charles D. Tarlton Kawamura and Jane Reichhold: Northampton, Massachusetts in the water drifting without roots one piece of a white stalk that I think I am

I enjoyed reading the tanka in this nicely produced journal, which generally capture the lives of women from varied backgrounds. While not especially focussing merely on women’s

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 95 situations, they have a feeling of being available Keyes’ poet about her sister: to any reader, male or female. It is this universality to which I feel able to respond. Take, not content for example, this tanka by Sally Biggar, where the to let things be writer relates to her mother’s deafness: my sister surges forward tonight the silence creating more waves is so deep I have to strain to hear anything— Emotions are conveyed with powerful I feel the isolation evocations of images, memories and feelings: the of mother’s deafness ravage of years, lying awake worrying, remembrance, dementia, sadness are all The writers often relate to difficult or painful portrayed in this fine volume, as in Antoinette moments in their lives. It is this intimacy coupled Libro’s tanka in memory of Toni Calvello: with the simplicity and musicality of the tanka form which is so inspirational. On her mother’s summer’s end death, Susan Constable writes poignantly of the a lone seagull last rites: among the clouds already missing you sometimes the rest of my days there’s nothing more to say— we bathe The power comes at times through delicate our mother’s body understatement and at others from knowing for the last and only time exactly how much must be stated, as in Catherine Anne Nowaski’s tanka about visiting a grave: Like most collections of tanka, many of them relate to nature and the observation of the one month world around, as in Janet Lynn Davis’s poem: after your passing the torn grass silence that outlines your grave follows me around still not healed at my heels in midday sun These highly condensed poems often hinge a field of white stars on words or phrases connected with nature and the way in which it helps to take away the pain of Humour does not seem to play a large part sadness, as we see in Janet Qually’s tanka: in the poems. Perhaps Peggy Heinrich’s tanka comes nearest to humour: midnight a shaft of moonlight envious on the monolith of those born my sadness blows away years after me with a gust of wind of a body smooth and firm as a fresh plum and the love of a particular painting also demonstrates our common experiences, beyond Family play a large part in these poets’ lives: cultural and geographical boundaries, as Kozue here we have mothers, fathers, sisters, husbands, Uzawa’s tanka portrays: lovers, daughters and children. Here is Keitha

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 96 in the museum different but complimentary states.” I see van Gogh’s In his Preface, Fiore writes: “In the old days loneliness tanka poets would attach very literal prose pieces in his sunflowers to their poems. ‘Written March 16 1066, in in his ukiyo-e plum flowers Kyoto.’ Maybe they’d add, ‘It rained all day.’” Stuart Dybik’s Introduction states that Fiore’s Overall, perhaps the most important point of work is about “counterpoint, interplay, especially the journal might be that we can’t really grasp the interplay between the rhythms of the line and another person’s experience, either in ourselves the rhythms of the sentence.” or by reading a poem about it. What is striking flowers to the torch is a book with somewhat about the tanka is their authenticity. There is also concentrated forms of short paragraphs of prose a truthfulness in tanka that makes the reader feel interspersed with lyrical tanka. The book reads as though they alone are the recipient of the like a diary. It is comprised of 36 tanka prose emotion conveyed. Because of the simplicity of pieces (with extra prose and tanka) that follow the the form, the feelings are very intimate. The hero, Rocco. We are not to discover whether the collection as a whole celebrates the energy and poems are imaginative or factual on the part of interaction of women both in their lives, their the author. The main specific source of families, surroundings and with each other. meditation are the urban streets of youth, and the emotional life of the protagonist, Rocco, but * * * casting its light, and shaping his way of thinking, over just about every tanka prose, is his perception of phenomena—both material and Review: flowers to the torch, spiritual—as marvelous and inexplicable American Tanka Prose by Peter presence. Most of the poems are attempts at capturing the mood or fingerprint of some event Fiore that has impinged on his awareness. As well as the core poems, and the poems about youth, Reviewed by Patricia Prime there are those about the hero’s experiences in love and relationships. Poem after poem is an flowers to the torch, American Tanka Prose attempt to create or recreate some experience or Peter Fiore other, apprehending both the physical and Keibooks, Perryville, MD, 2015 spiritual in a convergent, almost indistinguishable Pb. 83 pp. way. ISBN 978-150757356. It could be said that this collection of tanka Price: $12.00 (print) $5.00 (Kindle) prose is a careful observation of the growth from youth to adulthood, composed in graceful Peter Fiore’s poems have been published in cadences and painstaking craft. But that would many journals and he is a regular contributor to be to understate its cumulative power. For Fiore, Atlas Poetica. In 2009, Fiore published text messages, the strangest things are the most intimate and the first volume of American poetry totally everyday: skating, a convertible, a café, camping, devoted to gogyohka. flowers to the torch is his first a honeymoon and more. Overall, the mood is of collection of tanka prose. The cover image, an attentive gratitude—not the social gesture, but Traffic Patterns is by Kenneth B. Dinkel and the a thankfulness that the things which make life cover design is by Elaine Zedda Palmaffy. worth living are such benign presences as no-one Charles D. Tarlton provides an illuminating essay has any right to expect. Fiore does not shy away at the end of the collection, in which he says, from difficult subjects and his craft is flexible and “the line between reality and fantasy is porous, adaptable enough to encompass the birth, and we live our lives slipping in and out of the

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 97 teenage years, envy of another youth’s car, grandmother prayed. fatherhood, his Nonno and much more, of the character, Rocco. In the lovely poem, “La Vallee Des Cloches,” The collection opens, in the title poem, with he describes being in a hotel overlooking the the conception of Rocco: Seine, where the magic of being in a romantic city, is powerfully expressed: It’s late spring. My father and mother are in the Botanical Gardens, in the Bronx. This is When you pressed a button, a waiter knocked many years ago. I am only beginning to rise on the door. One time I stood at the windows in my father’s blood, in my mother’s eyes. and looked out over the Seine and the Île and beyond to the rooftops and smoking chimney It is the first of a number of poems set in the pots and the back to you, smiling and urban landscape of the hero’s birth, childhood blushing, and I couldn’t believe you were and youth, recalling the inhabitants of his world: actually there, and we were actually here, friends, girlfriends, family and acquaintances. and I had to walk up to you and put my There is a characteristic liveliness and humour hands on your face to make sure. on display here. Among the poems are several about relationships. These often difficult subjects The poem ends with the lovely tanka: are handled with a sensitivity and lightness of touch resulting in large part from the tactful what if distance afforded by Fiore’s humour and skillful harmonic lines use of prose and verse, as in “Going After only slip into the present tense Kanterman,” where Rocco is in awe of his occasionally— friend, Eddie Kanterman’s ’50 Ford convertible better to die in your arms “tricked out with dual exhausts and Hollywood mufflers.” Elsewhere in the collection, Fiore’s acute The tanka prose are touched by the beauty sense of the emptiness of the urban environment of the world, even as they describe aspects of it is evident, as in “A Night in Tunisia” where, while that are not always pleasant, as in “Improvisation “Feeling abandoned,” the protagonist says: 17” on his Nonno’s birthday and the recollection it brings of Nonno’s cousin Nino’s death: Then one afternoon it happens. You come spinning out of the Crown on 52nd Street in Then I remembered Nino’d died one April the heaving snow and find all the cars morning 30 years ago, of a massive heart burning down slowly in the streets and the attack as he was walking out of the shower. only people left are refugees, their hands wrapped in socks, hunched against the snow, And yet, underlying the urban life is a sense they make their way to private destinations in of spiritual awareness that is never dogmatic or complete silence except for the ticking of strident, but is nevertheless persistent. This snow falling thru the empty skyscrapers, and comes to a head in “Skirting Flirtation” where, the slow swish of feet. he says, The way the “material” world is handled, in I spent my childhood in the basement of a a manner parallel to that in which less tangible mausoleum listening to hot jazz, and feeling things, such as “the rush of warm air washes up the maid, while upstairs my mother baked away all heartache and uncertainty”, is expressed apple pies, my grandfather stormed the halls in “Night Birds”, is poignant. It’s as if the pounding the floors with a golden staff, my disintegration of the old dualisms is occurring, father smiled and served drinks, and my

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 98 not just in Fiore’s imagination, but in his actual in the opening poem to the description of tucking language use. his father into bed near the end of the book. Another poem which figures strongly in the Nevertheless, despite the angst at the edges of book is “A Confluence of Rhythm,” where some of the tanka prose, Fiore’s is ultimately a Rocco and his wife are on holiday, celebrant’s voice. In the final tanka prose “the end of the line . . .” we are reminded that, They are on holiday. Amber colored condos despite everything, an angel will be there at the against the green of the dry hills. The red end to hold and comfort us—although not always clay courts were gone. In the condo above in the way we might expect! them an Italian couple with three young children. One of them plays a small djembe, is obviously someplace you’ve never been, badly. It turns out it’s the girl, the middle you’re not even sure you want to get off, child of about 9 with long dark curls, maybe you’ll just keep reincarnating back to sparkling eyes and her two new front teeth. the other end, but an angel approaches where you’re sitting looking out the window The claim for the poems to be lyrical comes, at the gray skies, the dark, greasy river, an I think, from their intensity, but the fact remains angel with Mediterranean blue eyes, an angel that the intellectual control which shapes the you know you can’t resist. poems is so strong that one comes away with the impression that they are somehow pure The poem ends with the tanka: rhapsodies given poetic form. Fiore brings patience and care, for instance, to observing his a shudder hero’s response not only when he is in love, but to and then you’re gone his feelings when he is taking care of his ageing off into eternal peace father. Here is the first section of the beautiful so we think poem, “Taking Care of My 98-year-old Dad I or does the light just shut off Pause to Write a Poem and Drink Wine”: Such moments of affirmation are far from I expect to find Mom’s ghost startle my heart facile; rather this work implies that they are hard- shut in the middle of the night hovering in won through experience and this finely-judged the doorway’s half-light, after all Dad sits in collection makes Fiore’s witness to them front of her ashes for hours and prays for his eminently believable. own death, but the other morning cooking bacon and pancakes I knew I’d become my mother—planning his meals, cleaning up dishes and rubbing pots till they shine, holding his hand when he goes to sleep and reminding him to say the Serenity Prayer, tomorrow is another day.

dreamed I saw you walking amidst the snow lilies

There is a pleasing sense here of things coming full circle, from the conception of Rocco

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 99 ANNOUNCEMENTS Bottle Rockets Press Announces Shards and Dust : Atlas Poetica will publish short announcements in any language up to 300 words in length on a space new & selected cherita available basis. Announcements may be edited for brevity, by Larry Kimmel clarity, grammar, or any other reason. Send announcements in the body of an email to: [email protected]—do “Shards and Dust,” a collection of new & not send attachments. selected cherita by Larry Kimmel, demonstrates this talented east/west fusionist’s flair for a TSA “Special Event” unified literature. The cherita is a six-line poetic form deriving from the haiku and its related Contest: October 2015 linked forms. Using only 35 of these brief, six- line poems, the poet has created a persona Dear Tanka Society of America members, moving through a sort of nano-odyssey of the inner-mind, showing a wide range of emotion Thanks to all who participated in this year’s and experience—from homestead memoirs to tanka contest! Now, you might want to start foreign and domestic travel—arriving at a thinking about your submissions for the 2015 spiritual/artistic conclusion. Not necessarily in a members’ anthology (deadline, September 30) as strict time-oriented sequence, like memory itself, well as our brand-new contest: this fragmented stream of consciousness is one TSA “Special Event” Contest: October 2015 man’s meditation on the human condition, done The Tanka Society of America is pleased to in a concise imagistic and heightened poetic announce a tanka prose contest that will take voice. place this fall. This fifteenth-anniversary special event is open to members and nonmembers Shard and Dust: new & selected cherita alike. There is no entry fee, and the first-place by Larry Kimmel winner will receive a 2016 TSA membership. ISBN: 978-0-9792257-8-9 Please see the submission guidelines at the TSA Perfect bound; 20 pages; 5 x 8 inches website for details. The guidelines also are $5.49 plus postage included in the spring/summer issue of Ribbons, $2.99 Kindle Books which is currently being mailed to members. We have quite a bit going on this year. Refer Bottle Rockets Press to our calendar on the website to help you keep P.O. Box 189 track of the various activities (including the next Windsor, CT 06095 Ribbons deadline). Happy writing!

Janet Lynn Davis TSA vice president & contest coordinator

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 100 englynjournal [at] outlook [dot] com Storyteller by Genie Nakano Please also include the following in your Introduced on YouTube with email: 1. Your name Silk Veil Dance 2. Your city/town and country of residence 3. Your poems (maximum of ten) A meditative tanka series with a introductory silk veil /dance performed by Genie and For more information, visit accompanied with flute, Alan Furatani and englynjournal.blogspot.co.uk and check our percussion by Joey Kamiya. “She enters the submission guidelines. We look forward to depths of a dark forest . . . her bare brown feet reading your work! fly over stones and water . . .” Storyteller a collection of tanka is available at online retailers. * * * * * * Keibooks Announces ANNOUNCEMENT: Warp and Weft, Tanka Threads Englyn: Journal of Four Line by Debbie Strange

Poetry Primal poetry with a pagan heart, Warp and Weft by Debbie Strange weaves tanka into short Submissions are now open for the first issue threads of three each, each triptych building into of Englyn—a brand new quarterly online journal a larger sequence that tells the story of a poet specialising in poetry of four lines. Issue One will with a raven’s eye. Traversing the wilderness of be published as a free download in January 2016 the human heart, Strange’s map is written with —we will be accepting submissions from August quills upon clouds. Each triptych is an until December 2015. Englyn is edited by British incantation to accompany the moments of life poet Liam Wilkinson. and impregnate them with the fecund power of Englyn accepts only submissions of short darkness. She is comfortable with night, with poetry consisting of exactly four lines. ravens, ashes, soil, pain, and the welling blood of This can include, but is not restricted to, free an injured heart. But for all the ghosts that glide quatrains, rhyming quatrains, ryuka, four-line through her lines, the wind always rises upwards haiku, dodoitsu, four-line tanka, quadrums, to become clouds and stars. englynion and rubaiyat. Regardless of name, we are looking for four-line poems that perfectly my hands capture their subject matter. In short, if the tend the wild roses poem consists of no fewer and no more than four upon your grave lines, we’ll consider publishing it. We will also in blood and blossoms consider sequences/strings/sets of four line I sanctify your name poems on the condition that each verse must be autonomous (able to stand alone as a single sailing poem). Please note, poems must be in English. into midnight We will consider poems which have previously encircled appeared on your personal social network page by stars upon stars but cannot accept poems which have appeared nothing but stars elsewhere. Please submit no more than ten four-line poems to:

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 101 at the stoplight she squeegees Call for Submissions: car windows I’ll Be Home her scrawny arms tattooed with poetry and addiction 25 Tanka on the theme of Your True Home she lies trembling breast-bare as he dissects the diagnosis Edited by Liam Wilkinson three daughter moths flutter in fear’s white blaze “Nowhere is the right place, and when I get riding pillion there I’ll be home” so writes the poet David my heart Budbill in his poem ‘Home’ (Moment to Moment: against your back Poems of a Mountain Recluse, 1999). All of us have a we unzip the highway sense of home, perhaps even a place we refer to at the velocity of night as our true home. But, as the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh says, your true home is “Warp and Weft is Debbie Strange’s Leaves of “something you can touch and live in every Grass. We have an amazing poet living amongst moment”. Perhaps we carry our home with us. us. Let us sing her praises.” Perhaps it’s somewhere or something to which —Alexis Rotella, author of Lip Prints, a we’re constantly trying to return. Perhaps we’ve tanka collection, and Between Waves, haiku left home for good. Perhaps we’re yet to find it at all. Warp and Weft, Tanka Threads For this Atlas Poetica special feature, I am by Debbie Strange seeking tanka that doesn’t simply mention home Edited by M. Kei or paint a pretty picture of that place we refer to ISBN 978-1512361124 (Print) 94 pp as home. I am looking for tanka that reveals our $12.00 USD (print) or $5.00 USD (Kindle) sense of home, not just as a physical place but as an understanding, a truth. Purchase in print at: https:// Please submit no more than ten previously www.createspace.com/5520311 unpublished tanka to thecarriagereturns (at) gmail (dot) com, complete with your name, city Also available in print and ebook at online and country of residence. Tanka which have retailers. been previously posted to personal Twitter accounts will be considered. Please make sure your tanka are not under consideration elsewhere. I will select 25 tanka in total for this special feature. Please familiarise yourself with the Atlas Poetica submission policy before submitting: http://atlaspoetica.org/?page_id=6 Submission schedule: October 1st – December 31st 2015. The feature will be published at the Atlas Poetica website in spring 2016. Many thanks, Liam Wilkinson

Atlas Poetica • Issue 23 • Page 102 Publications by Keibooks

Atlas Poetica : A Journal of Poetry of Place in Contemporary Tanka

Collections

Warp and Weft, Tanka Threads, by Debbie Strange

flowers to the torch : American Tanka Prose, by peter fiore

rising mist, fieldstones, by Joy McCall

Hedgerows, Tanka Pentaptychs, by Joy McCall

circling smoke, scattered bones, by Joy McCall

Tanka Left Behind : Tanka from the Notebooks of Sanford Goldstein, by Sanford Goldstein

This Short Life, Minimalist Tanka, by Sanford Goldstein

Anthologies Edited by M. Kei

Bright Stars, An Organic Tanka Anthology (Vols. 1–7)

Take Five : Best Contemporary Tanka (Vol. 4)

M. Kei’s Poetry Collections

January, A Tanka Diary

Slow Motion : The Log of a Chesapeake Bay Skipjack tanka and short forms

Heron Sea : Short Poems of the Chesapeake Bay tanka and short forms

M. Kei’s Novels

Pirates of the Narrow Seas 1 : The Sallee Rovers Pirates of the Narrow Seas 2 : Men of Honor Pirates of the Narrow Seas 3 : Iron Men Pirates of the Narrow Seas 4 : Heart of Oak

Man in the Crescent Moon : A Pirates of the Narrow Seas Adventure The Sea Leopard : A Pirates of the Narrow Seas Adventure

Fire Dragon