2024 Touchstone Awards for Individual Haibun – Short List
In this second round, the panel selected their top choices from the Long List. In the final round, the panel will select the haibun from the Short List that will be recognized as the Awarded haibun for 2024.
Many thanks to our distinguished panelists, Lorraine Padden, Renee Owen, and Marietta McGregor. Final results for the Touchstone Awards for Individual Haibun will be announced on April 17, as part of The Haiku Foundation’s celebration of International Haiku Poetry Day.
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
heartwood
for David “Woody” Stover
It began with a young beech tree on a windy day, mid-spring. Acting upon an impulse I cannot now explain, I pressed my ear to the smooth, gray bark and started listening. To my surprise, there was sound: a secret inner creaking, like a stifled moan, as the crown twisted in the breeze. It was voice—tree voice. Each limb, as it swayed high in the canopy, was sending reverberations down through the acoustic body of the tree and into my ear as I crouched patiently at its side.
hand at my chest
the doctor suspects
a murmur
That’s when I became a listener of trees: I quickly discovered that smooth bark was best; the thicker the cork layer, the fainter the sound. Lithe ones were more melodious, aged ones more laconic, terse. But all speaking.
Then one day I noticed a pileated woodpecker hammering away in the upper branches of an ash tree. Sneaking up to the bole, I put my ear against the bark: ta-tum ta-tum ta-a-TUM ta-tum… The wood trembled at each jab. Even the scrapes of the bird’s claws were amplified: every movement echoed inside me, as if the bird, the tree, and I were unified in a single, ringing vibration.
a simple procedure
to remove the weevil
—then silence
—Dylan Stover, Frogpond, Issue 47.3
In Her Name
still pond . . .
the past renders me
transparent
She’d survived in that small world, some days dark, others rose-tinted. I’d just started to feel her kicks. But I’d had to agree to let them wrest her from me because she would never take her first breath and I couldn’t subject her siblings to any more pain. They’d also told me I might die in the process if I kept her safe to full term. But lived she had, thus far, nestled inside me like the smallest Matryoshka doll. Irrevocably flawed, yet uniquely beautiful.
When the waves propelling her to her certain fate became stronger and ever more painful I cried out for mother, sister, friend. I thrust a list of numbers in the midwife’s hand, but she returned what seemed like hours later, saying of the few who’d answered no one could, or would come.
shimmering wings . . .
in the midst of life
we are in death
When the pulsing cord between us was severed, the kindly midwife implored me to look. How lovely she is, in spite of everything! But I couldn’t, wouldn’t prise myself from my eyes-tight-shut semblance of safety. Instead, I opened myself to that something in the trembling cradle of my arms. The weight of her, nothing compared to my bouncing newborns, but so much more than my neverborn who slipped from me, invisible in the gore, all those years ago.
And before she was spirited away, as my tears splashed on her damaged crown, I spoke her name. Lucy. After my mother’s older sister who vanished in the Blitz, never to return.
dragonfly —
I, too, am a dance
of light
—Claire Everett, Presence, Issue 80
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
—Lew Watts, Contemporary Haibun Online, Issue 20.2
(Apologies for the poor resolution of this haibun!)
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
—Lorraine Haig, haikuKATHA, Issue 37
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Čestitam svima. Zasluženo odabrani.
Wyborne
ważka —
ja też jestem tańcem
światła
Congratulations to all the nominees who made this shortlist for a Touchstone Award. My fellow Pondies and haiku friends especially. (A note to Kristen Lindquist and the webmaster: Sadly, the haibun by Lew Watts is a small image that makes the text very hard to read.)
Congratulations to the shortlisted writers, good luck. A worthy selection.