Chris Lynch's Blog

sunday afternoon

january 3rd

start work tomorrow;

today is leftovers

and a good book

Boots, the stray cat,

lies black and glossy

on the porch,

ignoring tomatoes

ripening above.

Lice-ridden, I stand

before class. The teacher says:

You will play with him.

***

Hungover, I stand

before class. I say:

You're lousy students.

In June, I married Tara Horner. A white wedding sounded as appealing as shock therapy, so instead we opted for exchanging rings in a quiet civil ceremony with a grand total of two guests. Life is good. We designed the wooden rings ourselves, and cannot speak highly enough of the craft and service of Touch Wood Rings, who produced them.

Since then, we've both been reading the large pile of submissions for The Tangled Bank anthology, the first release for Tangled Bank Press. I was initially concern

Sorting through my haiku from the walk, I’m reminded of the strange, whimsical moods I was in as I wandered alone across Japan. Some days — usually when the featureless road stretched out before me for hours on end — my idle brain would compose dozens of haiku in a single day. They sometimes shared a theme, and were often rather silly.

I discarded most of them, but occasionally I wrote them down, like the sequence below, an imaginary attack on the road by the forest. A more mundane version was a