We called her Buttercup but she’d answer to Mimosa. A carefree soul, she sucked honey from the comb and set us dreaming ... the drone of bees in lavender, a sticky sweetness on our thumbs, champagne cocktails on the Côte d’Azur. She worked in Sales, filed all the invoices under Sunshine until the boss grew tired of her madcap ways and let her go.

a sky
full of wind-tossed petals
how desolate
our garden feels
as days grow shorter

Around the water cooler, we still talk about how much we miss her. Jill heard she’s sleeping in the lungs of the old balloon man and that makes us happy, knowing on that first warm day, he’ll exhale slowly, and she’ll find herself drifting upward ... into the clear blue sky.

Harriot West

After many years of teaching ESL at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Harriot West began writing poetry as an antidote to academic writing. Her primary interest is haibun, and she is the author of two award-winning collections, Into the Light (Mountains and River Press, 2014) and Shades of Absence (Red Moon Press, 2018).

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Things I’ll Never Tell You, haibun by Harriot West which was nominated by MacQ for the Red Moon Anthologies, and selected for publication in Contemporary Haibun 17 (Red Moon Press, 2022).

⚡ 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)