Haiku the Times: And the winners are…

Many thanks to all the participants. We were very impressed by the genuine feeling of all the haiku submitted.

Here are our favorites and the reasoning behind our decisions.

LILY

sea brings back to shore
boy bloated like closed lily
life never unfurled

by Samuel Son

Samuel’s poem made us think of regugee children recently lost at sea. It captured the tragedy with a poignance and unexpected grace for such a topic.

noncontiguous

even our vastest
star-infested oceans now
just thick wet borders

by Anita Lo

In her bio, Anita talked about being the American born daughter of two Chinese immigrants. She captured the wonder of crossing the sea to a new land in her word choices (vastest star-infestd oceans) and reveals the sadness of reducing such wonder to just an immigration rule.

my black father didn’t
expect the taste of gunpowder
before he left home.

by Kavya Malhotra

Kavya uses her 17 syllables to capture the experience of someone wrongfully shot. She does it in a way that made us bow our heads. She does it without ever depicting the violence. She gives us compassion for someone we have never met. He is a father. He is her father.

Gerrymandering
and voter suppression made
an orange fool king.

by Mahan Ellison

Mahan submitted three haiku. We loved them all, but we chose this one because it seems to fit with the topic of our next anthology, The King in Orange. This is a challenge for America to overcome.

We’ll be contacting the four of you to arrange for delivery of your prizes.

All entrants received ebook copies of Haunted Futures.

 

 

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