Touchstone Awards for 2025

Secrets create a life often lasting longer than the duration of the secret. Secrets protect and lend power, but they also isolate. The unseen life of calculating the secrets necessary to survive a war surface in this poem, but also underneath the war, there is the stratum of what it means to be human.

When a poem starts, “secrets she,” it drills into an ancient western narrative of forbidden fruit and hidden selves. The deflections and the blame in the story of a lost Eden suggest the warring elements of human experience. To move from “secrets she” straight into a denial, possibly representing many betrayals by means of “secrets she did not mean to keep,” betrays the ache of all the ways humans can be misunderstood and how deeply we wish to mend our mortal battles.

This poem deftly suggests the uncontrollable nature of war. Given humanity’s penchant for violence, “war” has long been a season word in the world of haiku, and this poem echoes a current moral morass as old as the battle between dominance and non-dominance. In one interpretation, “she” is a combatant and has no doubt some kind of “Sophie’s Choice,” dilemma here. So much is suggested in such a novel way.

One’s reading of this poem could pivot in multiple places, offering both compression and a layered effect. Those with experience of war and care for refugees can visualize the weight of war on a woman’s spirit. Not only does this poem speak of secrets that cannot be divulged, the secrets also point to how “she” didn’t mean to keep the war so close to heart and mind. Was she a victim, a perpetrator? Both? How might war’s trauma express a battle inside her body? Was the war an external combat or an internal struggle? The poem isn’t saying. It has said enough.

In many parts of the world, farmers rely on olive trees as a source of income. To destroy a family’s trees is to send the family into poverty. In Gaza in particular, Palestinians are not only being killed with bombs and guns but also starved to death.

Olive trees also represent Palestinians’ rooted relationship to the land and are historical evidence of their existence in a place where they are rendered nameless. The word “old” supports this sense of rootedness and provides a lovely rhythm and assonance without drawing attention to itself.

In addition to evoking the political and economic devastation of destroying ancient olive groves in Palestine, the poem also honors trees as living beings whose deaths add to the already grievous hole in our collective psyche. The word “listed” is the power word in this poem. The TV station Al Jazeera shows a list of the dead each day as a way to counter the erasure of a culture. And while a tree may not make it to an official list of casualties, a family and community can still keenly feel its loss.

The position of the word “listed” in the middle of the poem serves to unbalance the reader and brings to mind the sense of its other meaning, “tilted to one side.” In this way, the poem departs from the conventional fragment-phrase structure, to powerful effect. In this interpretation, the scene becomes visual: the destroyed tree among the human bodies on the ground. The poem’s structure and the universal understanding of the olive branch as a symbol of peace combine to achieve the sense of disorientation and hope lost in a time of war.

The poet has, with great empathy, depicted a timely topic through clear, original imagery, precise word choice, and skillful use of structure.

Through the poet’s artful use of synesthesia, this beautiful and evocative poem doesn’t quite make rational sense, but we intuitively understand the interplay of sight and sound. We hear the deep, earthy cello notes as dusk, as darkness. We see the cellist bowing with sensitivity and care to match the music to the moment. Perhaps his or her playing is changing as twilight turns to night.

Dusk, especially autumn dusk, is a traditional kigo, or season word, that can evoke the bittersweet melancholy of fall. Though this poem does not specify the time of year, it conjures an autumnal mood of quiet contemplation and shifting into darkness. The choice of “dusk” on its own for the first line, plus the prominent placement of “dark” at the end of line two, deepen the sense of sorrow and loss amid the exquisite beauty of the music.

To tune a cello, one makes major adjustments with the four large pegs on the scroll and more subtle adjustments using the four fine tuners on the tailpiece. In fine-tuning his or her instrument, the musician also fine-tunes the space around it as the notes vibrate the air molecules and ripple outwards. At the same time, the cellist fine-tunes our emotions through the rich and resonant music that pours from the instrument.

During the depths of the COVID pandemic, renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma received a COVID shot at a Massachusetts vaccination clinic. To give thanks and to provide comfort to the workers and patients in a difficult time, he performed Bach and Schubert pieces on his cello in the waiting area. Fine-tuning the dark indeed!

The poet has made skillful use of sonic devices. Starting and ending with the same consonants, the words “dusk” and “dark” go beyond alliteration to echo and emphasize each other. While lines one and two end with a short, sharp “k,” the poem concludes with a long “o” like the last note of a cello piece, fading into twilight. This is a poem to see, hear, and savor on multiple readings.

A poem of just four words. Deceptively simple, it raises a complex question: how “big” is “big enough”?

Prayer rugs are sized to allow a person to kneel and to perform prostrations. Their purpose in Islam and in Orthodox Christianity is to provide a clean surface, regardless of the kind of environment a person finds themselves in at the time of prayer. But spreading a small rug on the ground or the floor provides more than protection from dust or soil. It creates a symbolic refuge—sacred ground in a world that does not often value the sacred. Whether in a corner of an airport or in a cubicle at a tech company, a practicing Muslim will pray five times a day. By invoking the image of a prayer rug, the poem witnesses those acts.

Intricately woven with patterns and materials characteristic of the culture of its origin, a prayer rug serves as a memory of home for those finding themselves in a foreign land. For an immigrant, a prayer rug might be a strong emotional and spiritual link to the place their people came from. A cherished possession, a rug may have been passed along in a family over many years, from father to son, mother to daughter. Thus, the prayers of generations are interwoven and contained in the very fabric of the tapestry. Kneeling onto the silk or wool that was touched countless times by their ancestors serves as a tangible reminder and a point of focus.

“Big enough” might also convey the challenge of sustaining belief during periods of spiritual drought. When faith struggles with doubt, the simple routine of kneeling on a prayer rug may carry a believer through those difficult times. Indeed, the “enough” could designate the rug as a small raft, just large enough to carry someone through life’s turbulent waters.

The shape of the poem is significant. During prayer, Muslims kneel at the base of the rug and perform prostrations towards the direction of Mecca. Does the shape of the poem invoke a prayer mat from the perspective of a prostrate person? Or the shape of one or more people praying, as seen from above? With the last line being the longest, do we see the prayer rug as supporting the weight of the poem itself?

Compact even by haiku standards, this poem weaves together strands of hope and faith that go to the heart of what it means to be human.

Transitions are the essence of life. We are all shifting from one age to another, passing through various seasons and storms, or ever-evolving into who we strive to become. This poem shines a delicate light on a challenging and sociopolitically charged transition, that of transitioning genders.

While one only needs to turn on the news to hear opinions on trans people, their bodies, or their lives, or read of the violence enacted towards the trans community, this poem seems to offer only a window into the experience without telling the reader what or how to feel. It uniquely renders the gradual understanding of identity, the small increments of knowing who we are, and who we are becoming.

The solstice itself is a progression as well as a gradual unfolding of what will be revealed in the second half of the year. Here, with “every day a little more” we are brought into the small moments within the largeness of the act of transition. It takes time, learning and unlearning, and moments of discovery and acceptance to become someone new. For the person in transition, as well as everyone else in their life, it is a gradual process, which the poet has deftly conveyed visually with line two, or the middle of the poem, to express progression.

We are not told whether this is from the daughter’s, the parent’s, or another loved one’s viewpoint. Only that they are becoming a daughter. Line three offers us the potentially double-sided coin of grief and joy. As the earth is letting go of the sun (in the northern hemisphere), so, too, is the individual letting go of the identity of being a son. With any transition, there is as much hello as there is goodbye. We are left with space to enter this moment with respect and see both sides.

After the solstice, the nights creep ever longer, hinting at the dangers the person in transition faces. The world is not safe for trans individuals. However, the poet has rendered a tenderness with their phrasing that suggests safety and celebration within family or chosen family. During pivotal moments in history, art must lead the way, and the timeliness of this poem cannot be overlooked.

Brad Bennett’s new book a rush of doves rejects numbered pagination and the more conventional organization of seasonal order. This serves the reader’s own pathfinding, following clouds and clusters of haiku that link or contrast. Yet, from the first haiku, we receive a welcome, a ritual of setting out, like the hiker sleeping over in a lodge before hiking the Appalachian Trail:

sunlit moss

a sit-a-while bench

in the silver maples

As in the separation phase of a rite of passage, we are drawn into a liminal space of contemplation where the self is suspended. We are initiated through words: sunlit/ sit/silver. Words are guides to seeing.

Bennett proves the haiku moment may be a deeply entangled in words, words caught in all their “thingliness”. Zen-like skepticism hovers around words in haiku. Eric Amman’s influential “The Wordless Poem” (1969) quotes Alan Watts: “if we compare the haiku to most Western poetry… the haiku poet seems to avoid words rather than display them”. But in Bennett’s haiku the discovery of the right word is as much an “aha!” moment as the perception itself. Bennett savors discovering words like polished stones, but always in service to a nuanced perception– the incremental shifts in light, density, and texture that measure out impermanence:

the ombre

of waxwings

mist to drizzle

early summer

a barred owl’s leap

before unfurling

Sometimes the perception of impermanence arises through an entanglement of sound and syntax, or synesthesia, as in this haiku where the tensions created by a split-second slippage allows “brown” to become a noun, “fall” a verb, so we see/hear both warblers and wind simultaneously:

the new brown

of fall warblers

wind in the oaks

In other haiku, we hear the entanglement of the natural object with its environing season through connecting textures inside words: “pluck”,”silk”,”dusk”:

plucking silk

from ears of corn

autumn dusk

or feel the way the casual hand driven path of a can opener intersects with the annual path of the sun:

solstice supper

the slow path

of the can opener.

The tactile vividness of the moment is conducted through the static electricity of words. Dailiness is enlivened and the cycle of samsara is shared as a casual, but deeply felt communion.

Bennet’s book privileges true haiku over senryu, but brings us subtly from the natural into the human world in disarming ways, tuning the reader’s ear to discover the same wonder of a forest floor in a disheveled bed:

thunderstorm

bunched up sheets

at the bottom of the bed

or to discover our own estrangement from each other in awakening neighborliness:

park bench

a stranger

becomes someone

Bennett shows a relaxed confidence that words, like the birder’s guide or binoculars, can serve as tools, not distractions. While I have focused on one of several tones and registers in this multifarious book, it impresses with its range and surprise. When the occasion demands a sudden shift into an austere white writing, words are stripped to skeleton:

y axis to x axis all day snow

This book’s great strength is its fusion of deep knowledge of the natural world with the sensory skill to sing into it—to make language sound out the nuances of the world and our impermanence.

Chuck Brickley’s long-awaited new collection downhill home (Snapshot Press) stood out to the panel immediately. Varied in technique and subject matter yet maintaining a distinctive voice throughout, this full-length work demonstrates that the medium of one-breath poetry is still rich with creative possibilities.

Throughout the book, Brickley effectively matches structure and subject matter:

half our state away

and yet the wipers swish

ash                   es

ash                   es

dawn     a needle in the last hopscotch square

Old Glory

waving like there’s no

Without being heavy-handed, Brickley includes poems with a poignant social consciousness:

alley frost

except

where he slept

city tents

a pitbull wags

what’s left

pausing

at the railing where he jumped

sunlight on the  bay

He also finds a way to give a strong sense of time and place to even the quiet pieces:

sunken hardhat

a few minnows resting

from the current

a fogbow

at the end

my hometown

just one more cartwheel the Milky Way

The nostalgia at the heart of this collection is conveyed with skill delicate and potent enough to leave readers reminiscing about things they never directly experienced. downhill home is a remarkable achievement and deeply worthy of this Touchstone Award!

Carolyn Hall, Pulling the Yarn

Fans of Carolyn Hall’s work, of which there are many, and new readers alike will not be

disappointed in her latest collection, Pulling the Yarn. This book, divided into two parts,

offers an impressive selection of 79 award winning and 53 previously uncollected haiku

spanning 25 years of Hall’s writing life.

The retrospective aspect of this collection allows the reader to discover overarching

motifs, “the yarn” that impels Hall as a writer. One such motif stated directly or implied is

that of cycle, concentric circles whose common center is an observer viewing

experience and their own life through a lens of haiku sensibility.

circle of lamplight —

I complete the baby quilt

begun for me

the way

she makes the whole pond tremble

. . . breaststroke

windfall apples

what I think about

what I think

four to hug it giant redwood

wild berries —

one training wheel lifts

round the curve

Overall Pulling the Yarn is organized by seasonal cycles beginning and ending in

Spring. Though this may be generally considered a conventional way to organize a

haiku collection, in this case it is a most apt choice – the broadest of the pond’s ripples.

Hall’s writing style is masterfully accessible and musical.

spilt milk

spreading along the grout lines

morning chill

my eighth decade

how the rains

rearrange the creek

Her word choices are delicately edited down to the essentialfrom bee sting

to emergency room

six stop lights

Her subject matter and details are precise, intimate, and evocative, creating resonate

touchpoints between moment and the universal.

her death date

I pause the river

in my cupped hands

The title haiku for uncollected section speaks to this choice of moment and experience –

the point where the flow of the universal narrows down to a specific instance that allows

its nature to lift off, to be seen, heard, and languaged by the poet.

where the stream

narrows into song

flight of the swallowtail

To put it plainly, Pulling the Yarn is packed full of top-quality haiku that have remained

fresh and relevant for over two and a half decades because they rise above and expand

beyond the topical. They speak to natural cycles and life experiences: the seasons,

transitions, birth, childhood, partnership, parenthood, the progression of time, death,

rebirth.

Perhaps the 5-word haiku that begins the entire collection best sums up Hall’s skill and

experience as author and editor, and the regenerative nature of the haiku creative

process itself.

keep this

toss that

spring

Kat Lehmann’s no matter how it ends a bluebird’s song  has already garnered accolades from the poetry world having received the 2025 Rattle Chapbook Prize. It’s easy to see why this collection deserves notice and praise. Lehmann explores the terrain of illness, loss, grief and recovery, subjects that have been written about across genres for generations. In lesser hands, the depiction of these human experiences risks becoming sentimental, cliché or redundant. Lehmann avoids these pitfalls through her skillful attention to the elements of poetry: sound, rhythm, word choice, imagery.

This haiku memoir travels the path from illness to recovery. Lehmann deftly pairs the natural world with life-changing experiences.

two

days

after

the

first

dose

the

world

falls

into

starlings

trapped in a body the star a sky wanders

The pairings are unexpected, often startling, and accomplish what all good poetry accomplishes: the images give the reader an intellectual, physical, and emotional experience, a moment the reader can reside in and wonder what it is like to be trapped in a body while the surrounding universe continues to spin.

Nuance and beauty abound in these pages alongside heart wrenching moments.

beyond the bed

a lilt of voices live

my former life

This poem invites us to read it out loud and fully appreciate its sound. The masterful use of rhythm, assonance and alliteration becomes its own pairing against the devastating losses and isolation of illness. Lehmann’s haiku and monoku are wonderfully understated. The reader is never told how to feel or what to think. Throughout, we’re kept interested in Lehman’s journey through unusual yet meaningful juxtapositions.

ICD

codes

the

taxonomy

of

raptors

river cloud

the X of this body

unsolvable

One of the many strengths of this collection is that it offers no answers about life, pain, illness or loss. The narrative dwells in uncertainty. Even hope and the future are held lightly. This perspective is particularly refreshing, courageous and brings a universality to each poem.

is it ok to hope an ocean road

but what if it all works out cherry blossoms

Recovery is presented as open-ended, another journey to embark upon. no matter how it ends a bluebird’s song  is compelling and rife with original images that do not soothe or instruct. Instead, we’re offered the present moment exactly as it is.

The poet and essayist Maggie Nelson complains in her  “The Art of Cruelty,” that while the media offers men a wide spectrum of hero-models to measure their aggression and rage by, the media mostly offers women female heroes who either turn their rage inward or become monstrous. Beary, a flawless carver of faceted haiku, has perfected haibun as an instrument for probing female rage and resistance within the coils of family romance.

In a kind of feminist intervention, Beary places a protagonist named “Susan” in the all-male world of the gun-slinging T.V. hit “Bonanza” and makes her an unsuspected, silent killer:

“They say the rancher’s killer could only be an outsider… She lifts her sewing scissors and drains the basin. Her delicate hands close the window. Now the smell of bleach is all but gone.

pine casket

the benediction of

black-eye susans.”

(“At the Ponderosa with Susan”)

Likewise, Beary has pushed the haibun toward a radical exposure of sexual abuse:

“how when we close our eyes, the bedroom door softly opens and a husky voice whispers. not asleep yet, are we?

leaky sunshine

a spiderweb fills the hole

in the canopy.”

(“Symbiotic Attraction”)

These haibun also offer a thick description of gender fluidity and desire outside heteronormative fault lines:

“A secret that my brother knows is that I lie kissing my best friend Esme who dresses in boy clothes…” (“Dad Says”).

Bringing the fine-honed dramatic skill of a short-story writer, and the rhetorical and formal variety of a lyric poet, Beary’s prose is always charged with variety and surprise. The titles alone show the imaginative and verbal energy: “Grief: the Uncut Version”; “Johnny Angel’s Last Dance (Up on the Rooftop); ”Longitude and Lassitude”.

In “The Super Power of Lipstick”, women battle over a dead mother’s body the way male warriors in “The Iliad” battle over the corpse of Sarpedon. “Lipstick” becomes the “weapon” as daughter and aunt vie to define and claim the dead mother:

“open casket

the unnatural blush

of her lips.”

True to the image-based concreteness of the best haiku prose, Beary builds a portrait layer by layer:

“Mom said peekaboo pink was perfect for bridge at the club house. deep-dive pink was perfect for lounging by the pool. Bubble gum pink was perfect for watching Law & Order reruns in her condo with the AC off.”

And here the haiku clinches the satire of a certain species of American decadence with a devasting interrogation:

“empty unit

sunlight warms the windowsill

starfish.”

Beary’s prose captures a conversational American idiom with the minimalism of writers like Chuck Pahlaniuk or Lauren Groff, but also toggles between cultures, shifting subtlety into Irish diction and vocabulary. In each case, the haibun have velocity and laser focus. Style serves suspense and delivery.

Beary also plays with genre and form, veering from immersive first-person confessions – “Right before my husband tells a lie, he touches the tip of his nose with his index finger…” , to persona poems, to stylized epistolary  pieces (“Dear Nancy Drew”), to fractured fairytales, such as “There Was an Old Woman” : “People think nursery rhymes are a way to lull newborns to sleep. But try telling that to the old woman in the giant shoe…”. The dispassionate compression and insistence of her style is most effective when she exposes violence under the cover of religion and conformity:

“A footprint marks his face. His white shirt is stained with blood. But the Blessed Heart insignia on his backpack is untouched.

purple crepe myrtle the wasps come calling.”

(“On a Day Like Any Other”)

The personal poems expand into wider indictments of cruelty and sexual exploitation across cultures and institutions. Cumulatively, the haibun create a daunting cosmology of generational trauma redeemed by hard-won knowledge, wit, and moments of grace where momentary streaks of light break in:

curlew song

all the way home

the circular path

(“Rosemary for Remembrance”)

Throughout this collection, intrigue is built into the constant slippage between autobiography and imagination, emotional exposure and firm verbal control. Beary is one of the editors of the recent “Haibun: A Writer’s Guide”, and in this collection they make each element of the haibun support the others: title, prose, haiku, all honed with craft and dynamic interactivity.

Terri French’s name and work are familiar to enthusiasts of haiku and haibun. Her widely published and frequently award-winning poetry has graced our literary niche for well over a decade now, and her latest offering reaches—or perhaps raises—the already sky-high bar she’s set for herself.

The 55 haibun and 2 tanka prose which comprise kaleidoscope dream (Red Moon Press) are immaculately crafted. As expected, each piece ends with a haiku or tanka. But, unique to this collection, French creates an additional pivot. A haiku stands alone on a page following each haibun or tanka prose.

For example, we have this piece:

bail

I tell him this is absolutely the last time. He gets into the car without speaking. One shoe is gone. I don’t ask why.

diddle diddle dumplin’

my son’s name

has no rhyme

And, on the following page, this haiku stands alone:

another birthday

trying to remember

his little boy voice

A true craftswoman, each title, prose piece, haiku, and tanka in French’s collection earns its place. Her natural storytelling abilities beautifully complement her technical skill in Japaniform poetry.

kaleidoscope dream spans from childhood to motherhood and beyond, conveying intimate details of a life beautifully lived and immaculately conveyed. Reading this was our pleasure, and giving it a Touchstone Award is our honor!

Like Smith’s earlier “Dark Testament”, which blacks out text from George Saunders’ novel “Lincoln in the Bardo” to create elegies for Black citizens murdered by police, her powerful “Runagate” combines rigorous truth-telling about the trauma of slavery with ambitious formal experimentation. Her project is, itself, conceptually brilliant: to research artifacts of slavery, then bring the voices of enslaved people to imaginative life in haiku and related forms. Accounts in the Library of Congress, as well as a database of ads at Cornell University of slaveholders trying to recapture runaway slaves, are transformed into a compelling and ambitious set of haiku and renku sequences, tanka, and haibun.

Some of the most effective work occurs in the opening section, where a carefully curated set of slave owner’s ads are presented verbatim on the verso page with Smith’s poems on the recto. The rawness of the racist mind in its cruelty and venality evokes Simone Weil’s term “banality of evil”.  This discourse pressures the haiku, making it carry enormous emotional and narrative weight. Sometimes in the service of complex story, the discrete identity of haiku as haiku is elided and a sequence feels more like a unified, sinewy narrative poem, which may be a worthy trade off. Sometimes that risk pays dividends in forging haiku that flash with harrowing intensity:

for it all

I was flogged

as he recited scripture

. . .

spring auction

a slave named

Mourning

. . .

on the move

the blessing

of morning fog

. . .

tied their feet

in bundles of rags

to leave no tracks

. . .

near dawn

my back aching

in barn warmth

. . .

the river’s

chattering run

a moonlit map

Smith’s work brings these self-liberating Black men and women to visceral life. Her strength as a writer includes her empathetic voicing of multiple personae and her creation of a vocabulary that bears the cadence of the past, while maintaining contemporary immediacy. Beyond this, she has also shaped the haiku sequence and other related forms into a contemporary response to the genre of slave narrative.

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.

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.

Every once in a while, haibun come along that elevate the genre to new levels of creative innovation.

hungry little girl is just such an expression. It is a joy to recognize and relish the extraordinary gestures in this winning haibun.

The piece opens with our narrator involved in highly relatable habits of care – lenses, lotions –  those daily moments that generally unfold in front of a bathroom mirror. An unexpected sensation interrupts this routine, and an intimate journey ensues. Emotional control, profound transformation, aging, and complicated relationships all arise to be held in tender and precarious tension as we read our way down a rather narrow column of prose. At the bottom, we learn that an uncooperative contact lens inspired the protagonist’s deep reflection.

While an errant lens might be a slight irritation, here it plays an outsized role in the construction of meaning. Beyond contact lenses’ literal impact on visual clarity, we can imagine that our human capacity for healthy loving relationships also relies on clear-eyed perception and understanding of self and other. How achingly poignant then, is the protagonist’s admission that ends the prose – that such a slight yet enormously important device is full of emptiness.

Emptiness as a conceit plays well throughout this haibun; it underlies a highly effective concrete design that offers negative space with ma resonance. In addition to its evocative title, there are two areas of text in this piece – the aforementioned prose that flows in a column down the left hand side of the page, and a single sinewy haiku that drips vertically, letter by letter, on the right. These areas of text bracket a vast white space in the center of the page – empty, indeed. hungry little girl is actually a rather short haibun that intentionally takes up an entire page, effectively drawing our eyes in multiple directions. Perhaps the most striking path takes us from left to right, as if the narrator is looking across the void at a bone-thin rail of letters that may double as an actual mirror, reflecting what’s hoped for but unavailable.

A final word on how these various innovations work together. The title of the haibun utilizes a strike-through to intimate what the reader will discover half-way through the prose; as a voiceless gesture, the strike-through points to but does not name. Nor does the haiku summarize the story. Instead, it offers a visual imagining that takes the narrative one step further – in this case, into emaciation – that has no room (despite the expansiveness of the page) for wholesome love and acceptance. Combine these with intriguing spatial dynamics and a story well-told, and we have an exceptional haibun that conveys much more than the sum of its parts. A deeply moving experience to read and admire.

How to Enter the Confessional

—- Cherie Hunter Day, Modern Haiku 56.2, Summer 2025

Visitation

— Kristen Lindquist, Honourable Mention, HPNC Haibun Contest 2025

Southern Comfort

— Peg Cherrin-Myers, contemporary haibun online, 21:3, November 30, 2025

Lucky

— John Barlow, First Place, Haiku Society of America Haibun Awards 2025

Dandelion Wishes

— Rich Youmans, Frogpond Vol. 48.3, 2025

The Far Shore

—- Sandip Chauhan, haikuKATHA, Issue  43, May 2025

Checkout Girl

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

Hungry Little Girl

— Peg Cherrin-Myers, whiptail Issue 13 June 2025

An Interview for Floor Manager at the Haiku Factory

— Kat Lehmann, MacQueen’s Quinterly Issue 30 Sept 2025

How to Enter the Confessional

— Cherie Hunter Day, Modern Haiku 56.2, Summer 2025

Visitation

— Kristen Lindquist, HPNC Haibun Contest 2025 (Honorable Mention)

The Wild Wood

— Barbara Sabol, Winner, Rachel Sutcliffe Memorial Haiku-Arts Contest 2025, Drifting Sands Haibun, Issue 31, March 2025.

Southern Comfort

— Peg Cherrin-Myers, contemporary haibun online, 21:3, November 30, 2025

No Universe Deep Enough

— Dylan Stover, Frogpond, 48.2, August 2025

The Soles of My Feet

—- Gerry Jacobson, Kokako, Issue 42, March 23, 2025

Into the Night

— John Budan, Drifting Sands Haibun, Issue 31;March 2025

Lucky

— John Barlow, First Place, Haiku Society of America Haibun Awards 2025

Dandelion Wishes

— Rich Youmans, Frogpond Vol. 48.3, 2025

The Far Shore

—- Sandip Chauhan, haikuKATHA, Issue  43, May 2025

Lantern

— Kala Ramesh, haikuKATHA, Issue 46, August 2025

Full Son

— Dylan Stover, cattails, October 2025

Checkout Girl

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

Hungry Little Girl

— Peg Cherrin-Myers, whiptail Issue 13 June 2025

An Interview for Floor Manager at the Haiku Factory

— Kat Lehmann, MacQueen’s Quinterly Issue 30 Sept 2025