welcome to this week’s packed issue of hedgerow! as always, grateful to readers & contributors alike. enjoy…

 

the art in this issue was brought to you by Debbie Strange. you can follow her blog here–

debbiemstrange.blogspot.ca

 

with love & kindness,

caroline skanne
founding editor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

haiku moment
I step outside
myself

.

catching up-
all the updates
we skip over

.

reunion
measuring how far
we moved apart

.

alone at home
I try to reason
with a leaky faucet

 

Debbi Antebi (@debbisland) exhales oxygen while writing poems. She lives in Istanbul, Turkey, with her husband and books.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

his mood swings
the pain in my chest
deepens

.

a monarch flutters
the pages in my book
become one

.

sun shower
today I will be polite
to you

 

Jade Pisani resides in Victoria, Australia. She has been writing haiku for the past five years and feels they are so addictive that sometimes she needs to pull over from driving to capture the moment. If she does not have pen and paper on her, she has been known to write a phrase on her rear vision mirror with lipstick.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

fools gold —
the forever
you promised
before you turned
and walked away

.

slow blues —
the everything
I’d give
for just one night
with you

.

all the lives
I could have lived —
magnolia breeze

 

Paul Smith is a poet from Worcester in the UK. Alongside poetry Paul enjoys Japanese style ink painting, building cigar box guitars and playing old time blues.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

dangerous shorebreak how else to fall in love

 

Meik Blöttenberger was born in Baltimore to German immigrant parents. He is currently living in Hanover, Pennsylvania and in a decade will be retiring to the high desert of Arizona. His other passions are photography and traveling.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

crystal night
brittle stars
in the rock pool

.

pebble beach
the night gleaming
with many moons

.

waiting in the rain
droplets of water
on her pearls

 

Simon Hanson now lives in sunny Queensland not too far from the shores of the Pacific ocean. He now composes haiku in a lush sub-tropical garden in the company of rosellas, rainbow lorikeets, king parrots, kookaburras and some very insistent butcher birds that arrive punctually for breakfast every morning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

spring cardinal —
carrying the wind
in his crest

Julie Warther (@JulieWarther) serves as Midwest Regional Coordinator for the Haiku Society of America. (http://www.hsa-haiku.org)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

waves breaking
on Otto’s Reef
no relief
from the excessive
heat of my passions

.

graffiti scrawled on
the pylons and undersides
of bridges…
the words
of the prophets

.

the town shrouded in misty rain
ghostly coconut palms
barely visible
even after all this time
I’m still haunted by her death

 

Ivan Randall lives in St Marys (N.S.W.), Australia not far from the Blue Mountains. He has been writing haiku and tanka since 2013. He also writes sonnets and free verse.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

what is naked
and lives in the twilight
like a specter…
silence fills me,
an autumn butterfly

Sergio A. Ortiz is the founding editor of Undertow Tanka Review. His collections of Tanka, For the Men to Come (2014), and From Life to Life (2014) were released by Amazon and Createspace as well as his full print collection of poems: At the Tail End of Dusk (2014). His collection of poems in Spanish, A La Orilla Lenta De Un Ocaso, was also released by Amazon and Createspace (2014).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

some days
seem to require 
such raw energy
just to dwell
in the nearness of life

Nancy Cross Dunham lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with her husband, Michael.  She writes poetry to try to figure out what she’s learning about herself, the world and the other people in it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the art in this issue was brought to you by Debbie Strange. the poems alone previously appeared in A Hundred Gourds. find out more about Debbie Strange here… https://hedgerowpoems.wordpress.com/poet-artist-in-conversation/