Chen-ou Liu, CA

 

 

Haiku   cocktail chitchat under the starlit sky a distant howl     moonlit pond a frog stares at a frog staring back     red brick wall spring clouds fleeting in the attic window     puddled road home one by one I step on autumn moons     New Year's Eve shredding my rejected poems into confetti     peeing after sex... I recall our summer night at Bridalveil Falls       Haiku Sequences   Like Father, Like Son?   Father’s words linger can you put food on the table? reading Poems to Eat at the departure gate Father doesn’t wave back summer heat first homecoming Father sighs your hair turns gray reunion dinner my niece giggles at my Mandarin reciting my poem to Father it's raining, he murmurs Note: Poems to Eat is written by Takuboku Ishikawa, one of Japan's most loved poets     Here and There   harvest moon a ball of fire rolls over the shanties starry night a wooden boat packed with migrants human bodies are found on the beach foggy sky people stand in long lines at a food bank winter sun     Out of Place   autumn sunrise over the Taj Mahal teardrops on her cheek those three words slip out of my mouth Tower of Pisa Venice something I've missed in her watery eyes a hazy moon over the Rashomon Gate does she love me? Tibetan Plateau faded prayer flags flutter in the autumn wind Great Wall resting in autumn moonlight the shadow and I Lake Ontario cupped in my hands her moon face     Haibun   A Time to Search and a Time to Give up for Mary Macdonell   While walking alone, I see a large flock of geese taking off from the pond in the middle of a ploughed field. These snow-white birds rise in unison as the sun emits its first light. nothing new under the sun? that spring day we met     Tanka   Home for Homeless Artists... I ponder this English name in my Chinese mind     with falling leaves I dance on the grave of my poems— in the beginning the poet wrote mere words     three years of my life have gone out the window listening to pauses between writing poems... the sound of falling leaves     I hang the conformist in me on the cross— a born-again poet who speaks in concrete images     summer heat.... words make love on paper engrossed like an aspiring member from Dead Poets Society     for hours now my muse and I have played hide and seek— a lone star stares at me on this Good Friday night     migrating through the ages geese leave no traces in the sky ...yet never forget the way home     Kyoka Sequence   Black Friday   Thanksgiving night Yo, all the iPods are gone a man yells to the line of cross-border shoppers who camp outside Best Buy my first time to sleep at Best Buy she smiles as a shouting match erupts inside the store the staff yells the 47-inch flat screens are sold out people waiting outside shiver in the cold morning     Monostiches*   a needle of writing sews up my sensory nerves moonlight ripples through snowflakes between sleeps the dagger of night stabs into fleshy secrets moonbeams grace the pond a splash heard tears from my mind deface the autumn moon living between a rose fingered dawn and an ink dark moon moonbeams hit the waves a sea of broken bones midnight shedding light on the scars of my past sleeping with banana moon I am pregnant with unborn verse peeling off layered loneliness I weave a white quilt my dead skin falls into a poem for the ground to read. to Latin music a poem dances the cha cha inside me   *A monostich is a poem which consists of a single line. Examples of monostich style of writing are found throughout history.  In ancient times Marcus Valerius Martialis (known in English as Martial-- 38  AD - 102  AD), was a Latin poet from Hispania -best known for his twelve books of Epigrams, published in Rome between AD 86 and 103. Modern monostich was started in Russia in 1894 when Valery Bryusov published the single line of pretty absurdic essence:О закрой свои бледные ноги. (Oh, cover your pale legs.) In Western poetry monostich was reinvented by Guillaume Apollinaire in his "Chantre" (1914). Monostich from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia