Adrift in the Floating World / Joanna Grant
Hiroshige Exhibit, British Museum, May 2025
Master draftsman of the floating world Hiroshige became a lay monk in his sixtieth year, another waystation on his long journey from east to west. The teaching tells us that everything sickens, everything slips away. The shoguns of his day banned so many images, so many subjects. To make a living, the artists and printmakers had to be so careful, to trim their sails, to chisel their woodblocks in such careful ways. Birds, fish, and flowers—tame stuff, you’d think. But look—the kingfisher sings its own song, the pine bough persists through color fade and season change—if the carp keeps leaping long and steady, it turns dragon, it brings the rain. And in the backgrounds behind the quality folk, boatmen drift through perfect blue, smoking their pipes and watching this vain world go by, waiting for change.
same old me
fresh white page
spring here again
Shallow depressions / Judit Hollos
a tanka sequence
shaman rite
untangling a skein of yarn
with knots of regrets
the notes of a robin’s song
wrapped up in spider silk
each day
new rubbles of grief
to wade through
the gunpoweder smell
of lunar regolith
shallow depressions –
my failure to trap
the tiny deaths
meandering around the peaks
and valleys of my journey
Plum Leaf Lotus / Zach Hauptman
the boy in the red wedding dress
spins in circles;
he is a dervish of delight
silver mirrors dance
sparkles across the walls
half-dressed bride
dredging up a girlhood
long abandoned;
abandoning her fears
into the spiraling current of red
silk gyre
under the surface hot hearts beating
in anticipatory sync
rotating in a two body problem
made easy by a singular body;
made easy beneath appreciative
eyes, mouth, hands;
made easy by a red wedding dress
pressing and shaping
spun out beneath
a green
canopy
she carries in warm pink hands
a trousseau
trembling, wedding chest
held close enough to possess;
held tight to corsetted belly
he opens it
he takes out the boy
the pocket rūmī / Brice Maiurro
today the title of this tiny book
hits me a bit differently
as for the first time
i picture a rūmī
no larger than a thimble
living among the dust & lint
of my jeans’ front pocket
tiny rūmī’s tiny head lost in volume
upon volume of even tinier
sufi texts meditations on theology
thick books of dense philosophy
his small body curved
against the hammock-like curve
of my pocket liner
& after enough time
breaking from his studies to
climb triumphantly to the top of
my right shoulder
where he spins
& spins & spins some more
there
in his characteristic ecstasy
now shrank down
but no less ecstatic
i would be so blessed
to have such a pure soul
dancing upon my sore shoulders
pondering questions of death’s
pleasures & life’s most sacred sorrows
writing persian verses
not just onto his tiny paper scrolls
but onto the very skin of me
& me left more drunk on the magic
i am gifted time & time again
as i realize that i have been here
all along
in the open palm of the earth
where she gazes the same loving way
at me
as i spin &
spin & spin some more
at the holy wow moment
of realizing that this wild world
(spinning
& spinning & spinning some more)
should only be made bigger
more mysterious & no less mystical
by a feeling of being
so very small upon it
Institutions / Kimberly O’Connor
are made of people—us. We
fret. We think we must
keep going
not seeing
obedience is
dangerous. First
the hospitals—we’re sorry
we can no longer serve you so that we may serve
the others. Then
the universities were sorry—they could not teach
just this one idea so that
they might teach the others.
Soon no one served.
No ideas
safe. We confuse ourselves. It was not done to us.
We said yes.
The Morning Run / Michael Schad
We are awake before
our children and wives-
to the poop loop we drive.
Sam and I unload from the car,
briefly stretch, slip on headlamps\
to run like cyclopes through the forest
watching out for sharp sticks
while we are free to leap over stones
and trip over rocks.
The path is narrow with undulating
hills and the smells are a thrill
so close to the Wastewater Treatment plant.
We breathe and talk, talk and run
until we emerge from the woods
to the edge of the river and then back
to the car parked under the bridge.
The sun is peeking over the horizon
and we drive away from the poop loop.
The Weight of Waiting (a haibun) / Kashiana Singh
Some weeks are better than others, she tells me, her voice low, her gaze averted. I see the truths she hides, reflected in the hollow of her eyes, in the tremor behind her words. I don’t press. Instead, I wear the practiced smile of someone pretending this is normal—the mother who must believe in something even when everything is unraveling.
We trade silences more often than words. I build stories with reasonable endings, line them with soft phrases to cradle her chaos. But life resists tidy explanations; it folds in on itself like paper soaked through, too sodden to hold a shape.
She speaks clinically now. Her voice, stripped of emotion, names the coldness on her chest, the drowning that comes without warning. She hides her storms from her father, wary of igniting old fears—the kind that echo through generations like a whispered curse.
“Enough is enough,” she whispers, again. And I hold her gaze, even as the weight of waking and sleeping and simply being threatens to crush her. The bed, the air, the very hours—everything bears the scent of waiting too long to breathe.
A vintage hourglass ticks grain by grain.
Inside, the noise builds to thunder.
She curls, still as clay.
beneath autumn leaves
the earth forgets to promise—
first frost in her bones
What Came Out / Elizabeth Wolf
