WILLOWS ON THE CROW
Haibun
The willows whipped us along the banks of the Crow River, the wind-driven lashings hustling us along on our cobbled raft between mucky dunes, over carp shadows, boulders whose slimy beards danced in waters stenched by the adhesive plant miles upriver. She and I were Tarzan and Jane, pirate and captive, boss and slave, poling deeper into the jungle, discussing her fate—flogging, short rations, thrown overboard. Later, we drifted in the sun on our backs.
the scent
of her wet swimsuit
after we took it off
—from Rattle #47, Spring 2015
Tribute to Japanese Forms
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Marsh Muirhead: “Haiku and haibun are a great place to store and flex the notions and images that come to us all the time and everywhere. They are sometimes starts to longer pieces, or as finished writing they serve as a kind of journaling, whether as fact or fiction, about our own lives or others we imagine.”