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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