Eric Burke, Guest Editor
digital painting "low sky" D. Wisely
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The Note
Right Hand Pointing, your journal which somewhat snottily prohibits haiku in its submission guidelines, here presents our second winter haiku issue. We do love haiku. But we don’t like to see it published alongside other styles and forms of poetry. Haiku, we believe, is best presented in the company of other haiku and related forms of verse.
This issue, like last year’s, is guest-edited by our long-time supporter and contributor Eric Burke. Let me tell you something about Eric. Eric has got some serious focus and discipline. Just short of 149 people submitted haiku to this issue. We allowed submitters to send in up to 10 poems and many did. I estimate that Eric read around 750 haiku, from which he selected the 42 poems which appear in this issue. I read a sampling of the poems Eric declined. It would have driven me slap crazy to have had to turn down that many poems, because so many were so good. If I had that dilemma, I undoubtedly would have consumed a whole pot of coffee and then, overnight, created a separate online haiku journal to accommodate more poems. Then I would have had a fourth journal to edit / co-edit. It would have forced me to follow my usual pattern of talking some fine person into coming on as a co-editor of the new haiku journal so I could dump the work on them (see: Kaminski, L. & McMunn-Tetangco, E. (2017), Agreeing to Co-Edit Literary Journals: Cautionary Tales. Journal of the International Academy of Literary Ethics, Vol 4 (3), pp. 13-33.)
Our special thanks to Eric for his hard work and sensitive reading for the issue. We hope you enjoy it.
Dale
next
back
I
Michael Dylan Welch
fresh ikebana—
a few cut stems
wetting the newspaper
next
back
Michael Dylan Welch
shadow lines—
the grain of wood
in her broken paddle
Michael Dylan Welch
fireworks over . . .
a translucent jellyfish
lit by the moon
day moon
the slow stream pillows
against a boulder
paul m.
paul m.
winter homecoming in the lake’s depths a sword
paul m.
head cropped in god’s selfie autumn leaves
blue to the touch even a lie welcome
Cherie Hunter Day
drought the dry weeds as handholds
Cherie Hunter Day
Cherie Hunter Day
dawn thoughts still damp from travel
Alan Summers
we shift and turn
the migrating clocks
fallen leaves
Alan Summers
homebound train
I correct
my wife's eyebrow
Alan Summers
T.V. news
the frightened room
is quiet
Erica Goss
afternoon clouds
I bite into an apple
to clean my teeth
Steve Klepetar
neighbors
two mulberry bushes
covered with snow
Olivier Schopfer
post-election
the path hidden
under fallen leaves
Ken Sawitri
spring shower
a toddler finds the laughter button
on her doll
Duncan Richardson
after the storm
my school squats
at a rainbow's end