It’s a place where no one catches a cold, where the day’s thermostat is always set to seventy. Flocks of sparrows, like party confetti blown from below, will rise to meet you. Piped-in reggae music from high clouds will carry the aroma of barbecue from Papa G K’s, your favorite place from the days when you were a meat eater. Light will fall out of paintings by Turner, giving you a ruddy look of inner immediacy. In a large park, saints will gather to take off their halos and toss them like frisbees. At the end of the day, everyone will moon-walk across water.

	steam rising from rice 
	no more leftovers for dinner 
	autumn evening 

Keith Polette

lives and writes in El Paso, Texas. He is the author of two collections of haibun, Soundings (Alba Publishing, 2023) and Pilgrimage (Red Moon Press, 2020). The latter received the Haiku Society of America’s Merit Book Award in 2021 for Best Haibun Book and was shortlisted for The Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Distinguished Books Award 2020. His collection of haiku, The New World (Red Moon Press, 2017), was shortlisted for The Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Distinguished Books Award 2017.

Polette’s poetry has appeared in numerous print and online venues, including Amethyst Review, The Esthetic Apostle, Eunoia Review, High Desert Journal, The Limberlost Review, One Sentence Poems, Otoliths Magazine, The Offbeat, Peeking Cat Anthology 2018, Piedmont Literary Review, Sky Island Journal, Shot Glass Journal, Typishly, and Valley Voices: A Literary Review.

His photo-haiku have appeared in Daily Haiga and Under the Bashō, and his haibun in Akitsu Quarterly, Blithe Spirit, Chrysanthemum, contemporary haibun online, Drifting Sands Haibun, Frogpond Journal, The Haibun Journal, Haibun Today, The Other Bunny, Presence, Prune Juice, and Sonic Boom Journal.

Polette’s publications also include articles on Language Arts pedagogy, literary criticism, and Jungian studies.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Featured Writer: Keith Polette, “First person reflections on the art of writing haibun” in contemporary haibun online 17.2 (August 2021)

⚡ The Boy Speaks in contemporary haibun online 19.1 (April 2023)

⚡(suspension bridge), photo-haiku in Under the Bashō (2022)

⚡(abandoned diner), photo-haiku in Daily Haiga (16 October 2018)

⚡Three photo-haiku [(faded paint–); (tune up–), and (vanishing point–)] in Under the Bashō (3 April 2018)