contemporary haibun volume 20: edited by Rich Youmans and the CH Staff

Description

contemporary haibun is a series dedicated to the best haibun and haiga published each year in English around the world. ch20 features 101 haibun and 32 full-color haiga.

“contemporary haibun has stood alone, for more than a decade, as the chief vehicle and bulwark of the burgeoning haibun movement in English. Without the vanguard role of this annual anthology, one might reasonably inquire how — and perhaps if — haibun would have survived.”
— Jeffrey Woodward
Editor, Haibun Today

Chaos Theorist

Every time I sit back
and listen to the cosmic energy
of an Albert Ayler or a Peter Brötzmann
I give thanks to the first
prehistoric fish to crawl past the line
where water and land meet
carrying the primordial memories
of the sea
of all the fire and ice that came
before all the moons and stars and
all the ancient energy
which has been passed down
throughout all of the millennia
across the family tree of
all previous living things
until it finally escaped out
of the horns
of a Pharoah Sanders
or a John Coltrane

    trying out new colors horsehead nebula

                     — petro c.k.

Go Slugger

My story sticks to me, a glop of honey, a tug of ambiguity, a big boy cut down to sighs, the borning breaths of briefly being. Bees bounce around the blackberries, their throw of thorns. Slugs graze their bowels in the backyard. I pick them up in a paper towel and toss them over the fence into the ferns. Imagine them indestructible, too simple for pain, tomorrow’s toehold. My eyespots are sensing this sentence’s end, its timey stream of drying slime, the dapper period, like the cell that started it all. Like cancer in the crotchy corner, eating my vigilant leaf.

     PSA, 9.4 —
     a shrivel
     in the genes

                     — Bill Gottlieb

The Library of Babel (after Jorge Luis Borges)

for weeks I worked on the library catalogue, those packed drawers infinite with cards and light-years: I never got used to its revelations: opening drawers at random, I found — photographs detailing Lindisfarne, The Book of Sand, a Spanish guitar and flamenco dancers, mosaics and a study in human anatomy, a woodblock print showing Mt Fuji, a kingfisher on blue paper that flew away into library arcana, a history of metals and a samurai sword in the making, Love itself, the Mad Hatter, and an analysis of Hamlet: one drawer gave me Mozarabic Bibles: another offered heaven, and another hell: one drawer contained the Indian Ocean, and one the whole of time, from beginning to the very end: the last I opened showed forth the Milky Way:

     my hands are turning
     into books
     I open my fingers
     into a world of print
     & a blossom of pink stars

                    — A. A. Marcoff

Relativity

There are some smells that hold the power to pluck you from the present moment and place you elsewhere. Put mushrooms on a summer barbeque, and I am knee-deep in the dew-damp grass of childhood, stringing field-picked mushrooms on a tráinín in an August meadow. Drop butter on a floury warm potato, and I can hear my mother’s call to dinner. Some scents are less benign, the violence of women’s lives, lived in the steeple’s shadow, ripples on the surface calm of burning incense. But then, ripened figs still hold the essence of first love, and the pungent smell of brassica brings me instantly to your side.

     after the rain
     the scent of apples
     before they fall

                    — Fionnuala Waldron

ISBN: 978-1-958408-63-6
Pages: 174
Size: 5.25″ x 8.25″
Binding: perfect softbound
Year Published: 2025