An Esoteriku by Patrick Sweeney

 

aneurysms in the back pockets of sorrow's long hallways

An Esoteriku by Anna N. Jennings

 

casting a spell
the shadow dance
of sunbeams

~

Anna N. Jennings believes in the magic of poetry. A semi-retired creative expressive arts therapist, Jennings facilitates weekly poetry sessions at a state correctional facility. She resides in Southern Vermont, USA. More info:  annanjennings.com 

An Esoteriku by Princes Rose Manuel

 

some clouds smell
they said
but no survivor to testify

~

Princes Rose grew up watching the moon and stars until the moon became plenty and the stars began to hide. Her vision might be blurry, but she still has the pictures in her mind. Pictures that keep her writing.

An Esoteriku by Gareth Nurden

 

moonglow
the dreamcatcher's feather
at my feet

~

Gareth Nurden is a haikuist from Newport, Wales, who has had several hundred pieces of his work appear in twenty countries worldwide in journals, anthologies, e-zines and blogs.

An Esoteriku by Vandana Parashar

 

whatever mother says
the possibility
of an avalanche

~

Vandana Parashar is an associate editor of haikuKATHA and one of the editors of Poetry Pea and #FemkuMag. Her debut e-chapbook, I Am, was published by Title IX Press (now Moth Orchid Press) in 2019 and her second chapbook, Alone, I Am Not, was published by Velvet Dusk Publishing in April 2022. She won the 2025 HIGH/COO Chapbook Award, and her third chapbook was published by Brooks Books. She is a Lord Shiva devotee but believes in goodness of thoughts, words and deeds rather than following elaborate rituals to appease God. She likes to spend time with nature and herself.

An Esoteriku by Sarah Mahina Calvello

 

stovetop coffee a haunted doll going through motions

~

Sarah Mahina Calvello lives in San Francisco and writes mostly haiku. She loves nature and is addicted to coffee. https://heyyouhaiku.blogspot.com/?m=1

"tiny monster" by Yongbo Ma, Helen Pletts, Barbara Leonhard, Belinda Subraman and Nolcha Fox

 

tiny monster

(Belinda)

I have the sudden relevance of an extinct wild flower
un-pressed, when all her petals are re-levelling.
I had been hiding amongst the walls of caves
and now I exist again between the bright horizon
of everything that blooms. And in this season of re-emerging
I am the gentle beast curling in the pollen, like a dazzled bee.

(Helen)

I float in warmth and breeze and sun.
No compass needs to guide me.
The bees abuzz above my face think
I am blossom, pollen-filled,
drunk with natural honey.

(Nolcha)

Cradled by the rocking fears
of Zeus. My fins, outstretched fingers,
tease owls. Their eyes set the sun.
I bask in Nyx's light & Hypnos' songs.
And descend into the indigo myth
until a new dawn.

(Barbara)

How many rebirths must it take
to attain such freshness
a petal, rippling in the green cloud.
Ancient fears fall away like scales, one by one,
even ancient wisdom loses its way.
You float, no longer needing purpose, listening
as all things burst into bloom.
Our flesh, too,
grows white and light, ready to be reborn.

(Yongbo)

I sail on green shadow lake.
Blossoms and branches sway.
Petals land on my shoulders,
are breeze-kissed to water,
a floating reminder
that I am here
before I've gone.

(Belinda)

(Belinda)

小怪兽

我忽然与一株绝迹野花有了关联

未曾被压制,当它所有花瓣重新舒展。

我曾藏身于岩壁洞穴之间

而今再度存在于

万物盛放的明亮天际之间

在这重现的时节

我是蜷伏在花粉里的温顺异兽

像一只目眩神迷的蜜蜂

(海伦)

我漂浮在暖意、微风与阳光里

无需罗盘指引方向

嗡嗡掠过我脸庞的蜜蜂们

都以为我是盛放的花

满身花粉,沉醉于天然蜜露

(诺尔查)

在宙斯摇荡的恐惧中安睡

我的鳍,舒展的手指

逗弄着猫头鹰。它们的眼睛点亮太阳

我沉浸在倪克斯的柔光

与许普诺斯的歌声里

沉入靛蓝色的神话深处

直至新的黎明降临

(芭芭拉)

需要多少次重生,才能有如此的清新

如一片花瓣,在绿云中荡漾

那些古老的恐惧如鳞片一一褪去

甚至那些古老的智慧也失去了方向

你漂浮着,不再需要目的,你在倾听

万物如花怒放。我们的肉身

也一同变得洁白而轻盈,准备再次重生

(永波)

我泛舟于绿影之湖

花枝轻摇

花瓣落上肩头

又被微风吻入水中

这飘零的提醒证明

在我离去之前

我曾在此

(贝琳达)

Belinda Subraman's art and poetry have appeared in many publications both online and in print. She is editor and publisher of GAS:  Poetry, Art and Music, an online zine and video show as well as a group on Facebook. She also does video interviews of poets and artists for GAS and Beatlife ezines. There are 247 videos pertaining to the arts and activism on her YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/@BelindaSubraman 

~

Ma Yongbo is a Ph.D., representative of Chinese avant-garde poetry, and a leading scholar in Anglo-American poetry. He has published over 80 original works and translations since 1986, including 6 poetry collections. He focuses on translating and teaching Anglo-American poetry and prose, including the works of Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Pound, Williams, and Ashbery. He recently published a complete translation of Moby Dick, which sold over half a mission copies. He teaches at Nanjing University of Science and Technology.

The Collected Poems of Ma Yongbo (4 volumes, Eastern Publishing Centre, 2024) includes 1178 poems and celebrates 40 years of writing poetry.

~

Helen Pletts 海伦·普莱茨 is the English co-translator of Chinese poet Ma Yongbo 马永波, her official translator. She is a committee member of CB1 Poetry, the established monthly poetry reading event in central Cambridge UK, which has organised poetry readings for many years. CB1 features up-and-coming writers and well-known poetry names.

Her work has been translated into Chinese, Bangla, Greek, Vietnamese, Serbian, Korean, Arabic, Italian, Albanian, and Romanian.

Website:  https://www.helenpletts.com/

~

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. Her blog: Extraordinary Sunshine Weaver.

~

Nolcha Fox's poems have been curated in print and online journals. A best-selling author, her poetry books are available on Amazon and Dancing Girl Press. Nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize multiple times. Editor of Chewers by Masticadores and LatinosUSA.

Website:  https://writingaddiction2.wordpress.com/

An Esoteriku by Vishal Prabhu

 

Tibetan incense
I bring home
a little bit of now

~

Educated as a chemical engineer, partly at Georgia Tech, Atlanta, Vishal Prabhu has since tried to escape writing a bio. The former was not his fault.

An Esoteriku by Randy Brooks

 

chew of rhubarb
a counter spell for
unrequited love

~

Randy Brooks is Professor of English Emeritus at Millikin University, where he teaches a haiku course. Randy and Shirley Brooks are publishers of Brooks Books and co-editors of Mayfly haiku magazine. His most recent publication is HAIKU DECK which features 52 haiku, one each for 52 cards. See the web page:  https://www.brooksbookshaiku.com/Brooks-HaikuDeck.html

An Esoteriku by Kala Ramesh

 

wind, the pied piper!
any which way it goes
leaves follow

~

Kala Ramesh, a renowned pioneer of haikai literature in India, was shortlisted for the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize in 2019 for her book, Beyond the Horizon Beyond. Founder of Triveni Haikai India and haikuKATHA Journal, Kala conceptualised and curated Triveni Utsav 2025, the ninth festival she has organised since 2006. HAIKUcharades: imaging haiku through dance and music and haibunSLAM are her contributions to the haikai world. Her book of tanka, tanka prose and tanka doha, the forest i know, was published by HarperCollins India in July 2021. Kala co-edited amber i pause, Triveni Volunteer Dhanyavaad Anthology, published by Hawakal. From 2024 Kala has initiated Triveni on Wheels, where she organised Triveni members' haikai reading in various cities, literary festivals and organisations. 

"Chrysalis" by Kaitlyn Downing

 

Chrysalis

Every three years, I crack my head open and almost die.

When I was three, I tripped and hit my head on a rock, the only rock for miles. I unconsciously fingered the thick, uneven scar above my right ear, under my hair. That was the worst one. The other two scars were hard to feel, but if you parted my hair just right, you could see them, thin white lines criss-crossing my skull. At six, I fell down the stairs. At nine, I was thrown from a horse.

Each time, I was saved in the nick of time or from the brink of death. Clumsy, they called me. Accident-prone.

To me, it felt like destiny.

They were right, though. I am clumsy, have always been awkward, unsteady on my legs that always seemed to belong to someone else. I've never been able to make my body move the way I wanted it to, graceful and light, deliberate. I felt more like the hippos in Fantasia, which was pretty much what I looked like in ballet class. The other girls wafted and lilted around me, while I clomped around in my tutu.

By twelve, it had only gotten worse. Now, I'm not just awkward and clumsy; I'm awkward and clumsy with acne and braces and boobs too small for a real bra, but too big to just wear a shirt without ridicule. Bad enough having parts of my head shaved so much of my life, I thought as I pedaled my ten-speed home from school. Billy Morton had asked if I had a brain tumor. 

I wondered if it would happen again this year, and if this time, they couldn't save me. That thought almost thrilled me. Death petrified me though, which was ironic, considering how close I had come so many times. Maybe that was why. I never found out what was next, not even a hint.

I pedaled harder down Kay Street, coasting downhill, sticking close to the sidewalk, listening for passing cars. The red brick Viking Hotel loomed in front of me.

I looked both ways before gliding across Bellevue Avenue, checking for cars flying around the corner. I pedaled hard up the small incline before coming to a stop at the light at Memorial Boulevard.

You'd think my parents would have kept me in some protective bubble after all my brushes with death, but they didn't, at least not obsessively. I wasn't the type to tempt fate needlessly—I didn't need to go skydiving or bungee-jumping; I could get hurt just walking. My body didn't need help to betray me.

I turned onto tree-lined Berkeley Avenue, relaxing at the empty road. Cars lined both sides due to limited parking, but I was scanning for moving ones. At the last second, I saw the car door open right in front of my bike. I braced for impact and closed my eyes as my body soared in slow motion over my handlebars, my head hitting the pavement.

All went black.

When I came to, I thought, not again. But the perspective was all wrong. I could see my body, lying in the road, blood soaking the concrete in an irregular pool, but I was standing in my head. Recognizing I wasn't in my body animated me, and I found myself floating upwards. A golden light pulsed all around me, and I realized that it was me.

There was no one around to save me this time, despite being one street from home.

I'm dead, I thought, and waited for the panic to start.

But the opposite happened.

A giddiness overwhelmed me and as I giggled, I discovered I was flying, that I had wings. And not just wings, but iridescent, gossamer wings of many colors that shimmered in the light. Effortlessly, I did an aerial somersault and had never felt so . . . me.

I gazed down at my body, still and growing colder, and realized that it was never mine, that I didn't belong in it. Gone was the awkwardness, the clumsiness. This was my true form, I knew, even as a call began, deep in the core of everything I was. A call to find my real family, where I truly belonged.

A call home.

~

Kaitlyn Downing—part fairy, part mermaid, and part cat—spends most of her time in her pool or her garden in Florida with her four cats when she's not teaching English. Her work has most recently appeared in Hemlock, 34 Orchard and Inkstains, among others.

An Esoteriku by Gordon Brown

 

apologies for the whisky
and the witches
in my accent

~

Gordon Brown grew up in the deserts of Syria and now lives in the deserts of Nevada. Since arriving in the New World, his work has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Weird Horror Magazine, Hunger Mountain Review, and elsewhere. His horror haiku chapbook, Skin Crawls, is forthcoming from Cuttlefish Books. He spends his time writing feverishly and looking after his cats, of which he has none.

"Angel Face" by Zach Lance

 

~

Zach Lance creates imaginary friends and new worlds in the post-modern kindergarten style. Painting these worlds with his new friends enables Zach to escape time.

Zach's latest work is currently on view, alongside that of Kevin Calhoun, in the Welborn Gallery at the Yadkin Cultural Arts Center, located in North Carolina's Wine Region, through April 24th.

An Esoteriku by Penny Lowery

 

a journey
through the underworld—
Hecate my guide

~

Dr. Penny Lowery has practised acupuncture for forty years, considering it a great privilege to be involved in the Magick of energy healing. She has used cupping, pendulum dowsing, moxa, ritual, needles and other methods in her practice, working primarily in London and Exeter.

She also has a PhD in age theory.

She is now retired and her main occupation is as a micropoet. She lives in Devon with her wife, Eileen Bonner, an abstract artist, and their dog.

A Tanka Haiga by Mark Meyer

 

~

Mark is a retired scientist and educator and has been a visual artist almost forever. He lives upstairs in his head in the middle of Lake Washington and loves dogs and cats, guitars, mysticism, the moon, Japan, ales, and sundry other diversions. His artwork is in numerous collections, both public and private. A neophyte writer, he's published two books and lots of short-form poetry hither, thither, and even yon. In other words, he's been around the block a few times.

An Esoteriku by M. R. Pelletier

 

Bodhidharma
at the wall—the silence
inside us

~

M. R. Pelletier lives in Kansas, but his haiku poetry travels the world. He has published in multiple journals, including Bamboo Hut, Five Fleas, Wales Haiku Journal, Madswirl and Failed Haiku among others.

An Esoteriku by Patrick Sweeney

 

somehow a man knows when he's bought his last pair of shoes

An Esoteriku by Anne Fox

 

faces in the fire
I burn all
my old names

~

Anne Fox, considered a witch-child from birth, is an off-planet soul doing psychopomp work behind the scenes for our dying civilization.

"Pierrot" by Mark Valentine

 

Pierrot

Pierrot in the metro, never full-seen. Present in the white faces of the passengers, the squirming gleam of the neon lights, the silver glint on the rails, the peeling posters, the scuffed rags of newspapers performing pirouettes along the platforms.

~

Mark Valentine is interested in bungalow visionaries, bedsit occultists, back-street brooders, bus station café poets, top floor troubadours, chip shop radicals, quayside soothsayers, semi-detached flying saucerists, reading room ruminators, rucksack ley-hunters, apocalypticks in creepered villas, terraced house neo-kabbalists, tower block zaum-niks, seekers of zodiacs, cliff-edge samphire-gatherers, and allied trades.

An Esoteriku by David McKee

 

rose-gold mesa
at sunrise
an origin myth

~

David McKee is a haiku poet and retired psychotherapist living in Madison, WI. David's haiku have been published in various journals, including Modern Haiku, Frogpond, Acorn, Kingfisher, Bones, Presence, and password. His work has been anthologized in The Red Moon Anthology, Haiku 2021, Haiku 2022, Haiku 2023, Haiku 2024, the Whiptail 2023 Anthology, and the Haiku 21.2 Anthology. He was also invited to join a group of 17 haiku poets in sharing large selections of their haiku in the New Resonance series published by Red Moon Press. He is an oblate of Holy Wisdom Monastery and serves as lead shepherd for the oblate formation program. He is also a member of The Stray Dog Sangha, a small Zen Buddhist group in Madison.

An Esoteriku by Anne Fox

 

a dark night in the whale's belly of dream

~

Anne Fox, considered a witch-child from birth, is an off-planet soul doing psychopomp work behind the scenes for our dying civilization.