Five Haiku about Tranquility by Barbara Harris Leonhard

 

Image / Nastasya Banana

Five Haiku about Tranquility

blooming crocus, cooing doves

solitude cools rain

humming bees, poetic breeze

**

lake grass prickles the hot sand

warm toes tickle waves

hollow reeds whistle my breath

**

garden bounties the sun, I’m

on a hungry quest

with a doe and a mud turtle

**

the riparian forest

weeping willow sighs 

a song to the old river

**

night breeze opens the window

hooting lone barred owl 

awakens my twilight dreams 

(First appeared in Tranquility: An Anthology of Haiku)

© Barbara Harris Leonhard

Barbara Harris Leonhard

Barbara Harris Leonhard is the author of Three-Penny Memories: A Poetic Memoir (2022) and The Lost Book of Zeroth (2025). She is co-author of Too Much Fun to Be Legal (2024) and Broken Rengay: Unruly Poetry (2025). She’s a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. Trending Poets named her Poet of the Year in 2023 and 2024. Her poetry has been translated into Italian, Albanian, and Chinese. She is the Editor for MasticadoresUSA and FEED THE HOLY. And Co-Bookshelf Editor on LatinosUSA. Her blog: Extraordinary Sunshine Weaver. 

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Walk with Me by Julie A. Dickson

Image / Leticia Curvelo

Walk With Me

In the dunes

when the sand is warm

and sounds

capture my mind

Sitting as

the waves flow,

leave their treasures

on the shore

Walk with me

and feel the breeze

that makes the

Grasses bend

Peacefully,

in silent dreams

I walk with you

my friend

previously published on MasticadoresUSA

© Julie A. Dickson

Julie A. Dickson

Julie A. Dickson is a long-time poet whose work has appeared in over 75 journals. She has served as a guest editor and a past member of the poetry board. Her full-length works are available on Amazon. Dickson advocates for captive elephants and shares her home with two rescued cats, Cam and Jojo.

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Kindnesses by LeeAnn Pickrell

Image / Ba Tik

Kindnesses

You hand me the cup of coffee, 

fresh brewed, as I walk into the kitchen 

just awake in my stockinged feet.

Each night when I brush my teeth 

my toothbrush has been charged 

because you switch out the plugs each day.

When you go to the store 

how often do you come home 

with something just for me—

this week, It’s-It Mini Ice Cream Sandwiches.

The tile patio table I write on 

passed along to us by an acquaintance 

because she knew we liked it.

The hickory rake for the rock garden,

the sloped writing desk in the back bedroom, 

both made by our friend, just for me, just for us.

I take the ingredients out—gnocchi, spinach,

grated parmesan and mozzarella cheese—

and make dinner. Yesterday,

the day after the election and the country fell, 

I sent texts—I love you—to my brother, my mom.

I laughed with a friend last night on Facetime.

Put the trash bags in the can unasked. 

Gathered the redwood needles 

swept from the tree in yesterday’s wind. 

The sun rises each morning, 

some days breaking through the clouds, 

some days not. But it’s there, 

even during the most devastating storms

the sun is there, above the clouds, it rises and falls. 

Just this morning I watched a monarch butterfly 

drink from a Cosmos daisy. 

© LeeAnn Pickrell

LeeAnn Pickrell

LeeAnn Pickrell’s debut collection is Gathering the Pieces of Days from Unsolicited Press. Her chapbook Punctuated was published in 2024 by Bottlecap Press, and her book Tsunami is forthcoming in 2026, also from Unsolicited Press. She lives in Richmond, California. See more at www.leeannpickrell.com.

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Holy Movies by Merridawn Duckler

 

Image / Jona

Holy Movies

When I was a child

I was a child of the Super 8 

my positive image in reversed stock, 

my father a whirr,

my mother a skirt waft 

as we strode toward the little eye

hands held red rover, no one may break through.

Now movies play again re-mastered with mad color 

my mother crying, her tears trouble me; 

why do I care nothing for the past?

A discontinued technology which owes us nothing.

Nor care for any future;

the world that never existed,

who dares record it?

Behind me my watchful sisters

whisper each name: Geordie, Heidi 

Alysia whenever a face appears and I think

as I did then, for I believed no film could fail:

here I am, unretouched, my gait the same,

following no one to oblivion. I have no master,

not even the lines on the street.

Previously published in The Virgina Normal Journal

© Merridawn Duckler

Meridawn Duckler

Merridawn Duckler is a writer and visual artist from Oregon and author of INTERSTATE (dancing girl press), IDIOM (Washburn Prize, Harbor Review), MISSPENT YOUTH (rinky dink press), and ARRANGEMENT (Southernmost Books). She won the Beullah Rose Poetry Contest from Smartish Pace. She has work published in Seneca Review, Interim, Posit, Plume, Massachusetts Review, and Ninth Letter.

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Relapse by Ajanta Paul

 

Image | life._.kor

Relapse 

I want to fold back, to collapse 

and be carried upstream in my genes

to the sensuous sapience of innocent

infancy; to millennia ago when my cells 

were evolving in slow explosions

of change and metabolic mutations. 

I want to be an ancient fish

in turgid waters, coated 

with the slime of the ages,

the slippery patina of history 

colliding in atavistic awareness 

of life in its many forms. 

I want to return to being 

a foetus in the womb of time,

umbilically tied to the universe;

absorbing neonatal nutrients 

through a placenta that travelled

all the way from ether to embryo.

 

I wish to slide back in the scale

to a barely sentient species

navigating newly engendered feelings

in my endocrinal effusion 

as I gather into being 

over the slow centuries. 

I long to return to the condition 

of a stone, to burn and freeze

in extremes of weather, rocky

mountain fastness reflecting starlight 

that is thousands of years old

smelling of a long-dead source.

© Ajanta Paul

Ajanta Paul, Ph.D.

 Ajanta Paul, Ph.D., is a widely published poet, short story writer, and literary critic who was a former Principal of Women's Christian College, Kolkata. A Pushcart nominee, Ajanta has been published in journals including Capella Biannual Journal, Offcourse, The Statesman, The Wild Word, Atticus Review, and Spadina Literary Review. 

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