Farah Ali — Touchstone Award for Individual Haibun Winner 2025

Farah Ali is the recipient of a Touchstone Award for Individual Haibun for 2025 for the haibun:

Checkout Girl

neon enhances merchandise turns sallow skin
sallower dark circles cheap concealer layers acne
ugly blouse shiver fridges too close. shift starts hi
scan beep boyfriend beep exams beep clothes beep
broke beep pinch belly fat beep check collarbone
beep don’t beep think beep don’t think about beep
things you don’t beep want to think about beep here’s
your change. lonely men talk beep pretend beep to care
beep what does your name mean beep Joy beep pretty
like your eyes Joy beep smile beep cash card receipt
happy-rest-of-the-night watch darkness swallow them
whole. trolley squeal basket stack precarious clatter
splash rain drip overcharged who moved cereal. glass
bottle reflection window blank faces conveyor belt
jerks hi scan beep yawn beep notice everything beep
vegan-vegetarian-halal-lapsed beep comfort eats beep
new diet beep migraine beep addiction beep allergies
beep paranoid beep postpartum beep trying to conceive
beep light-medium-heavy beep angry beep sad beep
rich beep married beep breadline beep would take you
anywhere beep if you touched their hand and asked.
bags coupons baskets crash smirk told you so shelf
stacker tidies numb feet ache homeless bellows huddle
shrink shudder not paid enough to deal with this shit.
restless knuckle temples gnaw teeth scrape glitter nails
first last endless hour. get coat up down aisle marbled
plastic flesh red pink white mince steak thigh breast
liver scales gills reek gag outside stumble sewers bare
concrete trees sirens distant breathe pray ignore grubby
silver coin moon.

solar plexus unknotting the milky way

—- Farah Ali, Modern Haiku, Vol. 56.3, Autumn 2025

Commentary from the Panel:

An exceptional haibun—raw, unrelenting, and formally inventive—“Checkout Girl” immerses the reader in a conveyor belt of observation, dialogue, and interior monologue. The prose accumulates fragments of customer interactions, self-talk, ambient sound, and bodily awareness, all punctuated by the insistently irritating “beep” of scanned goods. This repetition becomes structural as well as sonic, shaping the rhythm of the piece while enacting the mechanization of identity.

The title situates us within everyday retail labor. What unfolds is anything but ordinary. The language is driven by hard consonants—c’s and k’s—that echo the clatter and collision of objects: “basket stack precarious clatter.” This sonic texture arises organically from the scene rather than being imposed upon it. The sparse punctuation further reinforces the effect, the text moving in an unbroken stream like items along a checkout belt, each moment briefly registered and then displaced.

The “beep” functions as an intrusive metronome, fragmenting thought and dialogue while collapsing distinctions between inner and outer experience. In this way, the prose challenges the reader formally and conceptually, mirroring the psychic disorientation of repetitive labor in contemporary life. The closing monoku—“solar plexus unknotting the milky way”— offers a striking expansion. After the density and compression of the prose, this line opens into a luminous, almost cosmic awareness. It does not resolve the tension so much as reframe it, shifting from constriction to boundlessness. This juxtaposition elevates the haibun beyond social realism, contributing meaningfully to the genre by stretching its formal and emotional range.

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