Category: issue 3 (Page 1 of 3)

Exploring the Meta-Haiku

By Chen-ou Liu, Canada

Bridging traditional brevity with sharp self-awareness, the meta-haiku turns the poetic lens inward. Rather than capturing a fleeting moment in nature, this self-reflexive form makes the anxious act of composition—and the constraints of its own three-line structure—the subject of the poem.

For example:

before false dawn
just three lines, blinking cursor
after sun down

There is a clear syntactic parallelism between Lines 1 and 3 (before [noun phrase] / after [noun phrase]). This grammatical mirroring creates a structural frame, establishing a mechanical, almost clockwork rhythm that evokes the passage of time. Within this frame, the middle line—and the narrator—seems trapped in a temporal loop.

By balancing the beginning and the end, the haiku formally enacts the very stagnation it describes. The day comes full circle, returning to its point of departure and leaving the narrator suspended in creative limbo.

Line 2 introduces the poem’s central image: the blinking cursor. Its rhythm evokes the hypnotic, faintly irritating pulse of a blank digital canvas. Here, a striking contrast emerges between the sweeping, macro-level movements of natural light—from false dawn to sundown—and the micro-level, artificial pulse of the screen. While the world turns through its daily cycle, the speaker remains fixed before a few inches of pixels.

The phrase “false dawn” carries a double significance. Literally, it refers to a deceptive glimmer of light before sunrise; metaphorically, it suggests the false starts and fleeting promises of creative inspiration. From the outset, then, the poem establishes an atmosphere of anticipated progress that never quite materializes.

Yet the poem’s ultimate payoff lies in its layers of meta-literary irony. It depicts a state of apparent artistic paralysis: after what seems to be a day-long vigil, the narrator has produced “just three lines” and remains transfixed by a blinking cursor.

The irony, of course, is that a haiku traditionally consists of three lines. The very statement of failure is itself a completed work. The narrator has crafted a concise, carefully structured poem to articulate the inability to write one. What appears to be creative stagnation is, in fact, a quiet act of creation.

By allowing its form to enact this paradox, the meta-haiku offers a subtle yet incisive critique of the creative process in the digital age. The screen’s blinking cursor becomes both an emblem of paralysis and a metronome for the poem’s restrained rhythm. The result is a finished monument to the feeling of being perpetually unfinished.

About

Chen-ou Liu is the author of five books, including “Following the Moon to the Maple Land” (First Prize, 2011 Haiku Pix Chapbook Contest) and “A Life in Transition and Translation” (Honorable Mention, 2014 Turtle Light Press Biennial Haiku Chapbook Competition). His tanka and haiku have been honored with many awards.

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Lux in Tenebris

By Sreelekha Chatterjee

It’s that time of the year when sunlight—once plentiful and abundant—mellows down. The sun takes a brisk, dispassionate course through the sky, like a much-awaited guest who arrives and almost immediately departs. My mind—disarranged by events, places, people, and sapped by the customs of quotidian existence—suddenly asks for a harvest to winnow the wheat from the chaff, resolving disorder into a pattern, ordo ab chao. Even Nature gracefully foreswears the claim to all its time-bound verdant and fruitful escapades—dropping the whispered truth of impermanence and the imperishability of change.

Liquidation of the previous seasons has a kind of charm to it. The daily walks, which kept deferring like the langour of a festival long held up, begin. Amid the solitude of a busy road, a wordless presence grips the air, as subtle and pervasive as the rich and heavy smokeless aroma of clarified butter in a fire oblation. With the street-side symphony echoing the pulsing heartbeats of festive drums, the celebration of inner Navratri supervenes—nine stages of overcoming the lower self. I learn a bit about my veiled identity.

Memories appear like the varicoloured, migratory birds that bring jollity of colour and brightness to the grey routine of my everyday life. My tiny fingers twirled around that of my grandmother’s, as we walk towards the milk booth, about 5–10 minutes away from our house. It’s more like an ant’s crawl, meeting and socialising with every single person on the road, the treat of being known and remaining connected. My mother’s hand is firm and perspicacious, as she introduces me to the concept of pedestrianism. The roads now are more crowded, with pavements mostly dissolved to accommodate extra vehicles, perhaps beyond necessity, like the complexities of a grown-up life. Uninfluenced by the vagaries of mind and emotion, the urge to unwind—to relax in the middle of the perpetual commuter chaos—is like a treasured souvenir. Swarmed with inspirations from people whom we see but never meet, the fragrances of their lives embellishing and filling the void that is so true of the liberating season.

All that melts and grows into the distance, into higher forms of understanding, is routed back into the mortal consciousness. The freshness of oranges, the feel of peaches and the delectability of nuts—no longer ethereal fruits dreamt of in summer—physically weave in their bouquet, the dreams of a tomorrow, yet to be decided. Yearning for sustainability prevails, so does longings without set boundaries. While negotiations keep happening with life, the longer jackets of fulfillment are worn to keep warm, channeling back to our cosy shelter. Lambent coherence of the knowledgeable self with the subconscious stands tall like the thread of light emanating from an earthen lamp that illuminates—when in multitude—the mystic night of the dark moon.

About

Sreelekha Chatterjee is an award-winning short story writer, poet and editor from New Delhi, India. Her non-fiction pieces have appeared in SugarSugarSalt Magazine, Five Minutes, Thomasonian, Usawa Literary Review, The Chakkar, Different Truths, Prosetrics, and in anthologies such as Wisdom of Our Mothers (Familia Books, USA), and elsewhere. She has been nominated for Best of the Net award, won the Mukoli Contest (Nonfiction category), and received the Writing Talent Award for TMYS Review.

Facebook: @sreelekha.chatterjee.1/, X (formerly Twitter): @sreelekha001, Instagram: @sreelekha2023, Bluesky: @sreelekha2024

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