Memories intrude in unexpected ways—the redolence of bruised lavender planted by a first wife, the buildup in the lint trap as someone’s mother grows frailer day by day, a lengthening crack on the wall from a glass thrown years ago in anger. Even my fir floor tells a tale—indentations where Jill teetered on stiletto heels three years before she died in childbirth.

painter’s drop cloth
all the colors
of other rooms

—Previously published in the author’s second book, Shades of Absence; appears here with her permission

Harriot West

lives in Eugene, Oregon. She is a three-time winner of the Modern Haiku award for best haibun as well as a recipient of the Museum of Haiku Literature Award. Her first book, Into the Light (Mountains and Rivers Press, 2014), a collection of haibun and haiku, tied for first place in the 2015 Haiku Society of America’s Mildred Kanterman Book Awards. Her second book, Shades of Absence, a collection of haibun and tanka prose, was published in 2018 by Red Moon Press.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ West’s ekphrastic haibun story Picking Sunflowers for Van Gogh first appeared in KYSO Flash online and is reprinted in our 2016 anthology, State of the Art. And we were thrilled when this charming piece was selected as one of 55 winners for reprinting in The Best Small Fictions 2017 anthology, guest edited by Amy Hempel.

⚡ Featured Writer: Harriot West in Contemporary Haibun Online (Volume 11, Number 1, April 2015); includes “a brief bit of advice” (86 words, in fact) from West on writing haibun, as well as her haibun “A Brief Analysis of Contemporary Society As Seen Through My Eyes”

⚡ Until One Day I Said Enough: Harriot West on Haibun, an interview by Jeffrey Woodward in Haibun Today (Volume 9, Number 1, March 2015)