Untitled collaborative shahai © 2023. All rights reserved.
Photograph © by Cáit O’Neill McCullagh and haiku © by Brian Kates.

raindrop 
   on a banyan leaf 
	   —fathoms deep

Cáit O’Neill McCullagh

lives in Easter Ross in the Highlands of Scotland. Her background includes her work as an ethnologist, archaeologist, and curator. Her academic writing has been published in peer-reviewed journals. She also writes for print and online journalism, including opinion editorials and cultural reviews for Bella Caledonia. Her essays on politics and cultural life have been published in Bella Caledonia: An Anthology of Writing from 2007-2021.

Cáit began writing poetry in December 2020. Since then, her poems have been published in print and online, including Northwords Now, The Poets Republic, Poetry Scotland, The Banyan Review, Drawn to the Light Press, Spilling Cocoa Over Martin Amis, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, and Visual Verse: An Anthology of Art and Words. Her first full-length collection of poems will be published by Drunk Muse Press in early 2024.

Brian Kates

is an award-winning author. His journalism has won a Pulitzer Prize and other honors. His poetry has appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Third Wednesday, The Banyan Review, Common Ground Review, The Ekphrastic Review, and elsewhere. His work was nominated for Best of the Net in 2021 and 2022. He lives with his wife in a house in the woods in the lower Hudson Valley of New York.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ A Lifelong Bachelor, poem by Brian Kates in Third Wednesday (20 June 2023)

⚡ Everlasting, poem by Kates in Amethyst Review (September 2022)