My aunt told me she’d dreamed her mother was standing at the foot of the bed, caught between two worlds. She said she helped her mother—and others who were stuck—to pass on to the next plane of existence. Once she took me to a fortune teller called the Goat Lady, who read our future from a deck of Braille-raised cards. I shared my dreams with her—my second mother, my special aunt, who whispered to the dead.
cache files—
the archived history of
the two of us
Years have come and gone, and still I find myself searching for the breadcrumb trails you’ve left behind. Did you mean for me to follow more closely in your footsteps? Or is it enough that on nights like this I feel your presence when it’s your touch I miss each day? The sound of your voice. The warmth of your hands. The way you’d coax me to live beyond my body’s confines.
dark of the moon
the hum of hornets
beneath the earth
poetry appears in numerous journals and anthologies, including I-40 Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Minyan Magazine, Naugatuck Review, ONE ART, and Sheila-Na-Gig. A Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee, she received a 2017 Haiku Society of America’s Mildred Kanterman Book Award for Prayer for the Dead: Collected Haibun & Tanka Prose (Singing Moon Press, 2016).
is an award-winning haiku, haibun, tanka, and sijo poet whose work has been published widely throughout the US, Canada, and the UK. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and has won prizes in the James W. Hackett International Award for Haiku (2000 and 2003), the Harold G. Henderson Awards (2002, 2004, 2007, and 2011), the Robert Spiess Memorial Haiku Award (2003, 2004, and 2005), the Robert Frost Poetry Festival (2008 and 2009), and the Kusamakura Haiku Competition (2006), among others. She is the author of two collections published by Red Dragonfly Press: Seeing It Now, haiku and tanka (2008); and Some Measure of Existence, haibun (2014), the latter of which won first place in the 2015 Mildred Kanterman Merit Book Awards and was also nominated for the Minnesota Book Awards.
A former editor for Contemporary Haibun Online, Buettner frequently writes book reviews for haiku and tanka journals. She lives in Chisago City, Minnesota, has taught haiku and tanka at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, and has presented poetry workshops throughout Minnesota.
