streetlamps lined up like toy soldiers...protecting who?
Orrin PréJean
swaying in dawn's blush an ancient dialect
Tiffany
Shaw-Diaz
Tiffany Shaw-Diaz is a Pushcart Prize and Dwarf Stars Award nominee who also works as a professional visual artist. She was shortlisted for The Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Award for Individual Poem in 2020 and won in 2021. Her poetry has been featured in Modern Haiku, The Heron’s Nest, Bones, NHK World Haiku Masters, The Mainichi, and more than 100 other publications. Her chapbooks include: says the rose (Yavanika Press 2019), filth (Proletaria 2020), and tyranny of the familiar (Yavanika Press 2020).
Forbidden Planet
my little daughter
wants to go there
Keith
Evetts
A former biologist and retired British diplomat, Keith Evetts has published papers in Nature and other scientific periodicals, and long-form poetry in The Oxford Magazine and elsewhere. His haiku and related forms have appeared in Wales Haiku Journal, Frogpond, Blithe Spirit, Prune Juice, Asahi Shimbun, Cold Moon Journal, Failed Haiku, Heliosparrow, Mamba, Fireflies’ Light, Haiku In Action, Cattails, World Haiku Review, Presence, Poetry Pea, Sonic Boom, MacQueens Quinterly, and at The Haiku Foundation; and award-winning cherita and gembun in The Cherita books and the Gembun anthologies. Listed in the top 100 European haikuists, he hosts the haiku commentary feature re:Virals at The Haiku Foundation. Married, with five children, a grey parrot and a sense of humour.
late morning nap my dreams much like snakes in a snake pit
Orrin PréJean
Orrin PréJean, from Port Arthur, Texas, came to EL Short Poetry around 2006. In 2013 he began writing tanka and has since published two collections of tanka. Orrin now focuses on the history and current practices of senryu and is a senryu poet with his first ebook collection of senryu titled October’s Kid.
Announcing our featured poets for July:
Orrin PréJean
Tiffany Shaw-Diaz
Keith Evetts
Julie Schwerin
Pippa Phillips
Valentina Ranaldi-Adams
Their poems from Cold Moon Journal will be published in the upcoming anthology.
Good luck to the 120 poets who will appear in this anthology, topping out the 1371 poems considered. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) will announce the winner after August.
under the sea
yesterdays of time
soaking in the wash
Stephen Jarrell Williams
blending in
with the curtains
at the party
always the wallflower
never the life
Susan Burch
Cup of jazz flavored
With a shot of muddy blues
Setting lips on
fire.
Karen A VandenBos
the air feels
less heavy
smog disappearing
since the day
you
walked out of my life
Lorelyn De la Cruz Arevalo