Contents

 

 

 

Chen-ou Liu, CA
 

 

 

 

Haiku

 

ice clinking
in my whisky glass
her face floats

 

 

awake among stars...
beneath a basement window
my single bed

 

 

equinox...
an autumn butterfly dream
beyond the window

 

 

blood-dotted dance floor...
somewhere in the distance
a lone mating call

 

 

shouting match...
a boy drums his fingertips
on the windowpane

 

 

first day of Ghost Month
a distant howl breaking
the moonless night

 

 

I see a man
in the black hooded robe...
Christmas dream

 

 

Christmas Eve
silhouettes in the window
with a bullet hole

 

 

Christmas morning
my neighbor's kid cuts off
his snowman's head

 

 

my heart flutters
like a crested pigeon
first sunrise...

 

 

Tanka

 

"A poet is a person
who can find his own way
by moonlight,"
I hiss through clenched teeth...
the look on her face

 

 

heavy snowfall...
her empty side of the bed
weighs down
the night meant to be
a world of our own

 

 

one by one
rejection emails arrive...
I watch
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
twice in one night

 

 

a pet morgue
opens on this sunny day

few people attend
a memorial service
for John and Jane Doe

 

 

nine autumns past...
puffy bags under my eyes
nights out
with Mother who lives
an ocean away

 

 

I listen
in the midnight
of my soul
to the sound of words
fighting against words

 

 

you're a poet
with your head in the clouds
she gives me
the Bodhisattva look...
this starless midsummer night

 

 

I'm tired
of hearing my own voice

one howl
breaking many shadows
on this moonlit night

 

 

hometown memories
lingering in a corner
of my mind

a line of geese
on the subway mosaic

 

 

pressing my face
against the bosom
of memory…
for the first time I feel
how the hunger for love speaks
(for bell hooks)

 

 

Monostiches

 

dead fish muttering my name illegal alien

I am stuck in mid-sentence hometown memories crabwalking

meditating on life and death a mud snail crawls

disemboweling my poetry with the critic's razor-sharp nose

petals on petals I haven’t become a hippo

moonlight on the cracks in the wall of my hometown memories

 

"pond life" Haiku Thread Results

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
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