A scenic trip on a steam train with a man I would later fall in love with. That day, as we said goodbye, he surprised me with a bear hug. I knew he was gay although he hadn’t said so. Still, on each subsequent farewell, his long, long embrace. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. The day I continued to bask in the pleasure of his arms for hours afterwards, I began to hope he was bisexual. In my teens the aroma from a fairies’ banquet had entangled me in a disastrous marriage.

wild mushrooms
I kept on picking
the wrong man

—The haiku “wild mushrooms” first appeared in Tiny Words (August 2021).

Alice Wanderer

lives in Frankston, Victoria, Australia. She fell in love with haiku in 2020. Her haibun, a patchwork of responses to her local environment, have appeared in Bloo Outlier, Contemporary Haibun Online, Drifting Sands, Failed Haiku, Modern Haiku, Presence, and World Haiku Review. Her translations of the haiku of Sugita Hisajo, Lips Licked Cleaned (Red Moon Press, 2021) received a Touchstone Distinguished Books Award for 2021.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Discovering Haibun, a 30-minute program in which Di Cousens talks with Alice Wanderer about writing and understanding haibun, on 3CR Community Radical Radio: Spoken Word (3 August 2023)

⚡ Fossil Beach, haibun in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 10, October 2021)

⚡ Spellbound, haiku sequence in Heliosparrow Poetry Journal (17 October 2021)