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| Issue 30: | Sept. 2025 |
| Haibun: | 163 words |
| (French | braided) |
By Kat Lehmann
Not by the Hairs of My
Chinny Chin Chin
“The first two pigs went to the brick house and were saved from the wolf,” I say. “They were eaten by the wolf,” my husband replies.
mud wallow
I cannot recall which version of “The Three Little Pigs” I heard as a child as I sheltered in the straw and faced the wolf alone.
hurricane howl
My husband and I cannot agree how the story ends, so I conduct an informal poll.
the true believers
What was the fate of the first two pigs? Out of fifty people, half say the wolf eats them. The other half say the first two pigs find refuge with the third pig in the brick house.
the I of storms
What if we’ve been telling the story wrong? The huffing and puffing is predictable. The pigs control their fate.
sprout wings
We do not embody the ruin of a crumbling house. We become survivors of it.
that remain
Kat Lehmann
is a founding co-chief editor of whiptail: journal of the single-line poem. She is a winner of the 2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize and The Haiku Foundation’s 2020 Touchstone Award for Individual Poem. Her sudo-ku mini-chapbook to wade through the wind as a night is forthcoming from Ghost City Press (summer 2025).
Kat served as a panelist for The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Distinguished Books Award (2021-2023), and her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net. A former research biochemist, Kat explores the grandiose within tiny haiku-genre poems, the storytelling possibilities of haibun, and experimentation with single- and multi-haiku forms. She lives in Connecticut with her family.
Author’s website: https://katlehmann.weebly.com/
More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond
⚡ Guests Kat Lehmann and Roberta Beary on “Experimental Haibun”: Episode 72 of The Poetry Space podcast by Katie Dozier and Timothy Green (2 August 2024)
⚡ Two Favorites: On Structure (“An Exploration into Haibun’s Fourth Element”) by Kat Lehmann in Contemporary Haibun Online (18.2, August 2022)
⚡ MacQ Author Index lists links for two dozen of Kat’s haibun, one of her cheribun, and two of her collaborative micro-poems with Bryan Rickert.
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