welcome to #45 of hedgerow. thrilled to introduce this month’s resident artist Sandi Pray. if you enjoy her art please find your way to her blog — http://ravencliffs.blogspot.com. a big thank you to all the poets contributing to this issue as well as the readers!

with love & kindness.

snow on church steps
the clatter of coins
in his paper cup

Chen-ou Liu is currently the editor and translator of NeverEnding Story, http://neverendingstoryhaikutanka.blogspot.ca/, and the author of five books, including Following the Moon to the Maple Land (First Prize, 2011 Haiku Pix Chapbook Contest) and A Life in Transition and Translation (Honorable Mention, 2014 Turtle Light Press Biennial Haiku Chapbook Competition)

stingray bay
dark shapes glide
through the night

Simon Hanson lives in rural South Australia near The Great Southern Ocean. He relishes these open spaces and the moods of the land and sea from which he draws much inspiration. The more he delves into haiku the more he realises that it is akin to a way of living and there is always so much more to learn.

thunderclouds
a dyer stirs his pot
of indigo

Marietta McGregor is an Australian botanist and writer who has spent much of her life explaining scientific concepts. She now tries to let things explain themselves through an early love, haiku. She lives in Canberra and hopes to capture a sense of the bush, mountains and ocean in her work.

meteor shower
         in the distance
       horse’s hooves

Mike Andrelczyk is currently living in Strasburg, Pa. Also lived in Los Angeles, Ca. and Lewes, De. He likes writing haiku about the ocean, potatoes, moons, plants – mostly little things except the ocean which is huge, and the moon which looks little but isn’t. Poems and fiction have been featured in Modern Haiku, Haiku 2015 (Modern Haiku Press), A New Resonance 8 (Red Moon Press), The Inquisitive Eater, The Bitchin’ Kitsch. Follow on Twitter @MikeAndrelczyk.

Homecoming

1
table full of crayons & oil
pastels    she draws a
self portrait – green eyes
bloom like sunflowers    hair
redbrown stripes – pink swirl
background  seems placid but
for a well of sad in the eyes
she shows me twenty other self
portraits drawn over seven
years – stormy crags
yellow faces rage off the
sketch pad    a revelation

today’s face stares
I cook her an omelet

2
she has been here bright as
morning sparking up
our days   rock & rolling down
evening with a
sweet song surge no
one else can sing
four months of being our
“only child” like she never
could    when my
mind was fogged with a house
full of spinning spirits storming
in and out like thunder

one summer to know her
will not be enough

3
two of us drive east –north- west up
rivers down mountains
van bursting with paints pots photos
her life    in a capsule summer
ends and we become two again as
paths diverge   I return home a
shade greyer    remembering her
bags left in every chair
bike parked in our living room
shoes abandoned in the middle
of the floor where I never
tripped over them never

nagged   knowing how soon they
would be gone

Carole Johnston lives and writes in Lexington, Kentucky, USA, although she is from “nowhere zen.”

the art in this issue was brought to you by Sandi Pray —

a wild child who roams between mountain and marsh in North Carolina and Florida, http://ravencliffs.blogspot.com.