squinting
at a price tag
cat’s eye glasses

The wind in the Hell’s Kitchen carpark feels colder than outside our mid-town hotel. A few vendors with sour expressions warm their hands on Starbucks grandes. Bedraggled furs, threadbare jackets, and limp dresses flap on metal racks. Cracked bowls hold tangles of paste necklaces, faux-Jackie three-strand pearls, and tarnished vermeil bangles. I’d hoped for treasures shed from the collections of Manhattan’s belles dames. Not today, off-season. My friend Sylvia is edgy because I made her get up early. She hates secondhand stuff. She needs a new coat. Preferably black, because she flies on to Spain tomorrow and doesn’t want to look like a tourist.

Away from the market we find a hole-in-the-wall frock shop with several coats on sale. Sylvia buys an ankle-length puffer coat, a sort of silvery-beige colour and cinched at the waist, the only one they have. She hands me her boyfriend’s vinyl biker jacket she borrowed before we left Sydney. It’s stiff and cold after our market browse. She spots her reflection in a window. “Dalek in New York!” From then on, that’s what she calls her new coat. I shrug on the biker jacket, glad of its wind-stopping bulk. Days later I discover I’ve mislaid my favourite stretchy leopard-pattern gloves I got from a cute little haberdasher in Pienza. Maybe they’ll turn up on a market stall.

borrowed coat
a parking ticket
still unpaid

Marietta McGregor’s

poetry appears in international haiku and haibun journals and anthologies including Red Moon collections (2018, 2021). Haiku Masters Japan featured her haiga. Awards include: first place, Irish Haiku Society’s 2020 Contest; first and runner-up, 2019 British Haibun Awards; March 2018 winner, Rattle Ekphrastic Poetry Challenge; first, 2019 UHTS Samurai Haibun Contest; third prize 2021 Peggy Willis Lyles Haiku Award; and Sakura awards, VCBF Haiku Contests (2017, 2021). A retired botanist and keen photographer, she likes to capture fleeting impressions of cities, coast and bush, both natural and human-made, and share some of their spirit through images and haiku.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Featured Writer: Marietta McGregor: “First-person reflections on the art of writing haibun” in contemporary haibun online (Issue 19:2, August 2023)

⚡ Haiga Showcase: Marietta McGregor in contemporary haibun online (Issue 17:1, April 2021)

⚡ Dirty Linen, haibun by Ms. McGregor in Willawaw Journal (Issue 6, Spring 2019)

⚡ The Visitant, haibun by Ms. McGregor in Rattle (26 April 2018); Editor’s Choice winner, Ekphrastic Challenge (March 2018)