Angela Leuck: A Haiku Sequence and A Tanka String

THREE HAIKU FOR MY SON

Inspired by Kazuhiko Ito’s

dear brother

don’t forget this—

birds

flying through the sky

have heavy entrails                   

Ferris Wheel: 101 Modern and Contemporary Tanka, 

Kozue Uzawa and Amelia Fielden, trans., Cheng & Tsui, 2006

Dear son,

remember this:

birdsong after rain

isn’t music

to worms

the peace dove

shits on your head

just like any other bird

women

with sultry voices

don’t have to shout

FOUR TANKA

home from college

my older sister

sprawls on the sofa

brazenly reading

Lady Chatterley’s Lover

outside my window

the snow-covered

mountain

T.S. Eliot

climbed in his youth

dull gray day

I turn on the lights

at lunchtime--

how once I devoured

Koestler’s Darkness at Noon

to remind himself

how lucky he is

my husband

dips into

the Gulag Archipelago

Award winning haiku and tanka poet Angela Leuck has been published in journals and anthologies worldwide. Her poems were included in Haiku Journey, a video game by Hot Lava Games (2006). The author of Garden Meditations and a cicada in the cosmos (inkling press, 2010), haiku white and haiku noir (carve, 2007) and Flower Heart (Blue Ginkgo Press, 2006), she also has edited numerous anthologies. She is the founder and organizer of the Black Tea Haiku Group in Montreal, and in 2005, with Kozue Uzawa, she co-founded Tanka Canada and its biannual journal Gusts.

Truck June 2015: Five Haiku by Joel Dias-Porter

Summer sun

A yellow-jacket

In the blue Kool-Aid

Spring sprinkle

The gutters fill with

Cherry blossoms

The gardener

switches her radio

to Al Green

Flotsam

Strewn about the beach

Tourists

New afro

A day In the life of

Dandelions

***

Joel Dias-Porter was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA. From 1994-1999 he competed in the National Poetry Slam, and was the 1998 and '99 Haiku Slam Champion. Places his poems have been published include POETRY, Ploughshares, Time Magazine, The Washington Post, Callaloo, Antioch Review, Red Brick Review, Beltway Quarterly and the anthologies Best American Poetry 2014, Gathering Ground, Break Beat Poets, Red Reads First, Love Poetry Out Loud, Meow: Spoken Word from the Black Cat, Short Fuse, Role Call, Def Poetry Jam, 360 Degrees of Black Poetry, Slam (The Book), Revival: Spoken Word from Lollapallooza, Poetry Nation, Beyond the Frontier, Spoken Word Revolution, Catch a Fire, and The Black Rooster Social Inn. Performances include the Today Show, the documentary SlamNation on BET, and in the feature film Slam. A Cave Canem fellow and the father of a young son, Dias-Porter has a CD of jazz and poetry on Black Magi Music, titled LibationSong.

Galanis-Calderaro: Collaboration

Our collaboration began in Puerto Rico in July 2013
when we met at the Walking Seminar. Two days into it —— out of a 3-week long walk in the island —— we decided to write a series of haikus together yet alone, as individual, then combined, responses to the landscapes we were walking in. We gave each other the task of writing either the first and third lines, or the second line, in sets of twelve, without sharing the results with each other; then reversed the distribution of task, up to 72 sets total. The last day in San Juan we sat down and finally shared the lines worked in this sort of blindness, combining them into final haikus. 

Part I is a selection of those first haikus created while walking in synchronicity.
 
Part II is a selection of haikus utilizing the same process once we were separate in different places after the Puerto Rican seminar. It is a remote collaboration that reflects the distance and the time lapses experienced a few months into separate realities. 

PART II

XIII
some nights, i recall
leaves will keep their energy
death - we were once friends

XXIII
taken from behind
a foreign tongue tastes like sex
capital, debt, law

II
We swam, we swam - then
aviones en el cielo
the phone stopped ringing

V
And then came the drought
walk slowly yet go, endless
the Jews of Madrid

XVI
careful, it might die
generosidad verde
books are funerals

XX
give me more music
his orgasm was her Why
for my bones to hear

PART I

IX
brain body skin flow

a dog curled up on the road 
mareao adrift floats


XVI
amor residual

fish explode like shooting stars 
amor sin red, sin 


VII path with no return 
water - all my relations 
sadness of the word


XIV
sleep naked, my love

at the airport, remove shoes 

no need for trophies 


XXVII 
thunder - lights go out 
exuberar~resistir 
fuck hernan cortes


XXXIV
evidence the odd

us, at night, swimming, laughing 
post humanizar 

Bibi Calderaro
Christos Galanis