My Haibun sequence about leaving Montana in The Mackinaw, and bonus haibun

It’s here!

I am so pleased to have this five-poem haibun sequence published by The Mackinaw, a journal of prose poetry. These five chapters work together to tell the story of leaving my first marriage, which really started before we were ever married when I first saw Portland, Oregon. Each part of the sequence has a slightly different tone. “Escape 1980” is my personal favorite.

Read it here:

Leaving Montana

Bonus Haibun

This is a nice example of the form, and it captures the longing and sadness of those miserable teen years, but I didn’t feel it belonged in the sequence. So I’ll put it here.

The Planet

One afternoon while visiting my parents in Portland, I watched “Silent Running” on TV. It’s about a manned spacecraft that holds geodesic domes that preserve Earth’s environments; desert, jungle, forest, arctic. The crew is helped by three small beeping droids, clear forerunners to R2D2. Forces on Earth decide to end this mission, and the ecological domes are slated for destruction. Bruce Dern is a crew member who refuses to accept that the mission is over. He rebels. At the end, it’s just him and one droid, and Dern is failing, too. So he makes a decision. He tells the little robot, “When I was a boy, I put a message in a bottle, and I threw it into the ocean. That’s what you are. A message in a bottle.” The final shot is the geodesic dome holding the little droid floating in space, carefully tending what’s left of Earth’s animals and vegetation. I was quietly devastated. For a full day after watching this movie, I would think of it and burst into tears. Earth, as far as I know, is alone in this universe. Despite searches and radio waves, telescopes and crafts of exploration, we still haven’t found any evidence of life as we know it. Our planet is that little dome of earthly life, floating alone in space. Sometimes the weight of that is almost more than I can bear.

wheeling, watering

alone in the universe

tiny guardian