Rich Youmans — Touchstone Award for Individual Haibun Winner 2025

Rich Youmans is the recipient of a Toucstone Award for Individual Haibun for 2025 for the haibun:

Dandelion Wishes

Early Stages: The Visit 

She told me to have another and held out the box of chocolates,  the name of each on the raised lid. It had started to rain again,  softly, the high windows becoming teary and the room taking on  a ghostly pale. I picked one and she smiled. “Mom liked pralines  too,” she said, her voice bright. “They were one of her favorites. Remember how, every anniversary, Dad came home from work  with a box of pralines and a single rose, and Mom kept the petals  as they faded and fell.” “Just like Mom,” I said, and we stayed  quiet for a bit. She then smiled and talked about my nephew,  Danny, her only child, who was studying to be an architect. She  brought up the old neighborhood, each rowhouse identical as if  it were a clone, and how we’d ride our blue bikes around the  block and not ever tire. “Mom would wave from the front porch  every time we sped past,” she said. “Imagine, sixty years ago,” her  voice as soft as the rain before turning bright again. “Remember  when I was nine and sick in bed with jaundice—my eyes had  turned yellow. You brought me a fuzzy dandelion from our lawn  and told me to make a wish… I remember so clearly, it was the  middle of May—May 16.” I laughed. “I wish I had your mind for  dates.” “I wish I still had the dandelion,” she said, looking at me  with that face she sometimes got. Just as I was about to ask when  Mom died, the nursing home attendant appeared and said  visiting hours were ending.

Middle Stages: The Fading 

She told me to have another and held out the box of chocolates,  the name of each on the raised lid. It had started to rain again,  softly, the high windows becoming teary and the room taking on  a ghostly pale. I picked one and she smiled. “Mom liked pralines  too,” she said, her voice bright. “They were one of her favorites.  Remember how, every anniversary, Dad came home from work  with a box of pralines and a single rose, and Mom kept the petals  as they faded and fell.” “Just like Mom,” I said, and we stayed  quiet for a bit. She then smiled and talked about my nephew,  Danny, her only child, who was studying to be an architect. She  brought up the old neighborhood, each rowhouse identical as if  it were a clone, and how we’d ride our blue bikes around the  block and not ever tire. “Mom would wave from the front porch  every time we sped past,” she said. “Imagine, sixty years ago,” her  voice as soft as the rain before turning bright again. “Remember  when I was nine and sick in bed with jaundice—my eyes had  turned yellow. You brought me a fuzzy dandelion from our lawn  and told me to make a wish… I remember so clearly, it was the  middle of May—May 16.” I laughed. “I wish I had your mind for  dates.” “I wish I still had the dandelion,” she said, looking at me  with that face she sometimes got. Just as I was about to ask when  Mom died, the nursing home attendant appeared and said  visiting hours were ending.

Late Stages: And Yet 

She told me to have another and held out the box of chocolates,  the name of each on the raised lid. It had started to rain again,  softly, the high windows becoming teary and the room taking on  a ghostly pale. I picked one and she smiled. “Mom liked pralines  too,” she said, her voice bright. “They were one of her favorites. Remember how, every anniversary, Dad came home from work  with a box of pralines and a single rose, and Mom kept the petals  as they faded and fell.” “Just like Mom,” I said, and we stayed  quiet for a bit. She then smiled and talked about my nephew,  Danny, her only child, who was studying to be an architect. She  brought up the old neighborhood, each rowhouse identical as if  it were a clone, and how we’d ride our blue bikes around the  block and not ever tire. “Mom would wave from the front porch  every time we sped past,” she said. “Imagine, sixty years ago,” her  voice as soft as the rain before turning bright again. “Remember  when I was nine and sick in bed with jaundice—my eyes had  turned yellow. You brought me a fuzzy dandelion from our lawn  and told me to make a wish… I remember so clearly, it was the  middle of May—May 16.” I laughed. “I wish I had your mind for  dates.” “I wish I still had the dandelion,” she said, looking at me  with that face she sometimes got. Just as I was about to ask when  Mom died, the nursing home attendant appeared and said  visiting hours were ending.

—- Rich Youmans, Frogpond Vol. 48.3, 2025

Commentary from the panel:

Rich Youmans’ “Dandelion Wishes” is a powerful example of burning haibun, a newer form in which prose visibly erodes on the page. Here, that erosion is not ornamental. It becomes the poem’s central expressive act. Rather than merely describing cognitive decline, the haibun enacts it. Language itself begins to fail under emotional and neurological pressure, and the reader experiences that failure as part of the work’s meaning.

The piece moves through three stages: “Early Stages: The Visit,” “Middle Stages: The Fading,” and “Late Stages: And Yet.” That tripartite structure gives the work narrative clarity while allowing its formal breakdown to feel inevitable. In the first section, the prose remains intact. We are given scene, weather, family memory, dialogue, and the ordinary tenderness of a family visit. The emotional field is domestic, grounded, and fully legible. Then the language begins to thin.

In the middle section, the text becomes unstable. Some words remain dark and legible while others recede into gray. What survives are not random scraps but emotionally charged terms. The reader begins to understand that memory may fail while feeling remains stubbornly alive.

By the final section, the prose field has broken into scattered verbal remnants. At this point Youmans recalls several twentieth-century experimental practices, including the cut-up methods of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, the French OuLiPo movement’s use of constraint, and Dadaist collage. Yet “Dandelion Wishes” is not merely an experiment in disruption. Its method is governed by feeling. Fragmentation here is not merely cleverness; it is loss.

The phrase “And Yet” also opens another resonance, recalling Kobayashi Issa’s famous haiku:

the world of dew
is only the world of dew—
and yet, and yet . . .

Youmans’ haibun does something similar. It accepts diminishment, even enacts it, but refuses emotional erasure. The title, too, does fine work. A dandelion wish is breath-borne, childlike, ephemeral. It evokes both the tenderness of the remembered scene and the later scattering of self.

Burning haibun, at its best, does not simply break text apart. It discovers what fragmentation can reveal that continuous narrative cannot. In “Dandelion Wishes,” erosion becomes the poem’s grammar. What falls away matters, but so does what remains. Name. Voice. Wish. Wind. Like Issa’s “and yet,” this haibun leaves us in the space where loss is undeniable, and love persists anyway.

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