2024 Touchstone Awards for Individual Haibun – Awarded Haibun

The Haiku Foundation is pleased to announce the Touchstone Awards for Individual Haibun, honoring haibun published in 2024. Two hundred fifty haibun were nominated by poets, readers, and editors around the world, from dozens of journals, books, and contests. After much deliberation, the three panelists narrowed the field to a Long List of 15 haibun, then a Short List of seven. This third and final round recognizes four haibun with the highest honor of Awarded.

These Awarded works represent the very best of the English-language haibun that were published last year, and the overall high quality and creative diversity of the nominated works made the selection choice an enjoyable challenge for the panelists. Thank you to all the editors who published or otherwise showcased haibun in this past year and individuals who published/read and nominated haibun this past year. And thank you so much to the hard-working haibun panelists—Lorraine Padden, Renee Owen, and Marietta McGregor—for their time, effort, and expertise in making these selections and writing the commentaries.

The panelists’ commentaries for these Awardees will be shared one at a time over the next few weeks, interspersed with those of the Awarded Individual Poems and Distinguished Books, so the Touchstone party isn’t over yet!.

Please join us in congratulating the awarded poets!

Kristen Lindquist,
Coordinator, Touchstone Awards for Individual Haibun

Grief: The Uncut Version

childhood desk
i trace initials
no longer mine

Life is a scratchy film reel that plays in your head, your mother swanning into the solarium that overlooks the pool; life is her eyeing you from her loveseat perch, on her lap pink crocheted squares and the latest Dick Francis; life is you laughing when she says, Roberta, all kidding aside, you could stand to lose a few pounds maybe eat more salads, and even though you will sell the Florida condo, life is spending an hour looking at its staged photos, zooming in on what your mother calls the solarium and you call the sunroom just to hear her brusque correction; life is the warmth of the sun on your face as you curl up under her afghan no one else wants, while reading Dick Francis for the umpteenth time; life is letting the book fall from your hands as you close your eyes, a scratchy film reel playing in your head, your mother swanning into the sunroom solarium sunroom solarium sunroom.

10 years gone clouds shift a broken stairway

—Roberta Beary, MacQueen’s Quinterly Issue 24

I always imagine when I take my mother’s ashes out of the armoire, I will be ugly-crying with snot, tears and guilt all over my face and hands.

I remove the engraved cherrywood box that holds our cat’s ashes to get to my mother’s. I don’t remember what hers looks like, how it’s still in the white postal envelope from Indiana with large orange stickers on all four sides that read “Cremated Remains” in bold print. The weight catches me off guard,

and I say, “Damn, Mom, you’re really heavy!”  There I am, holding my mom and laughing.  I’m in such a good mood I even throw the cat’s box  into my backpack for our trip. I’m so happy  to show her my Ram Longhorn and have her listen  to all my favorite honky-tonks.

Whenever I turn onto a street, I stretch out my right arm to keep the pack from sliding as if  she’s sitting there, and once I realize what I’m doing,  I pull over and buckle her in.

At the trailhead, I tell her I’ve inherited  her inability to get lost on trails. How  someone could spin me in circles,  and I’d still be able to feel her  compass in me pointing north. The first pond

we come up on sounds like a frog orgy, and I say,  “Mom, these are frogs,” and she says, “Peggy Sue,  I know what frogs sound like. I’m not deaf.” And I say,  “Oh, I didn’t know the dead could hear.” And that’s how  most of our hike went: me pointing out trees I’ve named  Little Miss Giraffe, Cup Holder, Slingshot, and her smart-ass comments that I catch mid-air in my fist and

swallow. At one point, she complains about an odor,  and I say I don’t know what that is, but it smells like something has died, and I think how ironic she be complaining about the dead smelling bad.

Nearing the finish of our hike, we hear sirens off in the distance that remind her of the life sentence I’ve given myself, and she says, “Please don’t kill yourself,” and I say, “Did you?”

—Peg Cherrin-Myers, Contemporary Haibun Online, Issue 20.1

The Shape of a Life

Do you remember how, when we first met, and it was my turn to stand in front of the class and give a how-to speech on a skill of my choosing, you booed me? And when we taught for a week in that remote Slovakian village, the one so small it didn’t have lodging for visitors, but so bizarre it had a zoo with a few spare beds, and goats that bleated us awake each day in time to walk two miles down the dirt road to where we taught? And when, the first time, I didn’t even see the testing strip on the counter, but brushed it off the bag of baby clothes you put together to tell me? And when we found, together, the place where language fails, shrugs and lies down? Like the zoo’s only lion, lazing at the back of its cage in the shade? For a long time we spoke of returning there, of those dark wooden ceiling beams splayed with whorls of all shapes and sizes, which we classified while lying in bed on our backs, and named, late into the night. This morning, though you aren’t quite showing, you placed my hand on your stomach and the firmness there sent an electric thrill through my whole body, so that this wild thing we’re trying, again, became a new kind of real. Now, I want to capture something of the evening light glancing off the puzzle you’re stooped over, of your searching for the edge pieces without any kind of system that will let you know when you’ve found them all, and of your laughing, softly, when I point that out, following your every move.

sanding down
an edge of the abacus
soft summer wind

—Evan Vandermeer, hedgerow, Issue 145

He slices through the pristine reflections in his tinny. It’s high tide. Zipping up creeks like a dragonfly, he slides on the slick surface, planes over submerged logs and vanishes into the high reaches to empty and bait his pots. He works fast or he’ll remain stranded on the dropping tide.

Meanwhile, I’m taking our three-year-old daughter on a bus to attend weekly therapy classes. First, it is speech. After that, plastic shapes are strewn across the table. Her hands spasm as she tries to push the blocks through matching holes.

Hauling a trap to the surface among the mangrove’s smooth limbs, he hears the click of their breathing. In the pot five startled crabs cling like rock climbers, their eyes swivelling in fright. He shakes them out to scatter about his bare feet, re-baits and lowers the pot overboard.

It’s the last session, she fears the most. The swing spins to a stop. The therapist steadies her head and stares into spinning green eyes. She’s relieved when it’s over and we catch the bus for home.

Pinning each crab under his big toe, he straitjackets the claws. Scuttling sideways they hide under the wet sacks in the bow. He pours coffee and lights a smoke, watching the water rise and fall like the lungs of his sleeping child.

depth of blue
a stingray circles
the aquarium