There are no lotuses in my garden. No jungle animals. Not a single elephant or monkey or lion. But there are daylilies, and naked ladies. As well as sparrows and wrens and crows and jays. For the past year-and-a-half, I’ve lived an intermittent life beside them. My circadian rhythm slowed to a snail’s pace of eating, sleeping, eating. Come dawn I watch the heads of trumpet-shaped flowers slowly open, lifting up morning prayers: for love, for hope, for peace. For wisdom and passion and humility. For the strength to face another pandemic-laden day with bravery and grace.

midsummer madness—
penciling myself into
Rousseau’s dreamscape

Le Rêve (The Dream) by Henri Rousseau (1910)

Publisher’s Note:

This oil-on-canvas painting by Rousseau (1844–1910) was his last completed work and is held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The reproduction above was downloaded from the public domain via Wikimedia Commons (link retrieved on 24 July 2021).

Margaret Dornaus

holds an MFA in the translation of poetry from the University of Arkansas. She recently had the privilege of editing and publishing a pandemic-themed anthology, Behind the Mask: Haiku in the Time of Covid-19, through her small literary press, Singing Moon. The first collection of her own poetry, Prayer for the Dead: Collected Haibun & Tanka Prose, received a 2017 Merit Book Award from the Haiku Society of America.

Her food and travel articles and her poems appear in national and international anthologies and journals, including publications specializing in Japanese short-form poetry such as: Contemporary Haibun Online; Haibun Today; Journeys 2015: An Anthology of International Haibun; Tanka 2020; The Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku (2012-2013); and The Red River Book of Haibun.

Additional work is included in Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems (Dos Gatos), Ain’t Gonna Be Treated This Way (Village Press), Red Earth Review, and The Texas Poetry Calendar.