A storm tore through town last week, leaving a large tree limb in our front yard. It missed the house by about the length of my body, and might have killed any of us had we been there for it to land on. And so, I throw to the wind my wife’s urging of caution, block out the pain of already blistering hands, and swing down from on high with the ax like one whose survival in winter depends on it. Branches shave off clean with every stroke, and in thirty minutes the thing lies before me good and chopped up. Twenty minutes more and its bits lie loosely stacked in our backyard. It’s an untidy pile, but the wood will burn.

heavy clouds ...
the mailwoman’s lips
hold her cig

Evan Vandermeer’s

first collection of poetry, Snow Day, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in October 2025. His poems have appeared in Eunoia Review, Grand Little Things, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and elsewhere.

His haibun “The Shape of a Life” won a 2024 Touchstone Award for Individual Haibun. His haikai have appeared in bottle rockets, contemporary haibun online, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, Presence, and Wales Haiku Journal, among others; and have been anthologized in A New Resonance 14: Emerging Voices in English-Language Haiku (Red Moon Press, 2025), Haiku 2023 (Modern Haiku Press), and The Unexpected Weight: The Haiku Society of America Mentorship Program Anthology 2021 (HSA, 2022).

Vandermeer has a Master’s in English from Indiana University South Bend, and works as a recruiter for Open Philanthropy, a philanthropic advisory and funding organization. He also serves as the Haiku Society of America’s Newsletter Editor and resides in Madison, Tennessee.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Blessed by Evan Vandermeer in contemporary haibun online (20:1, April 2024)

⚡ Sleepwalking by Vandermeer in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 12, March 2022)

⚡ Three Poems by Vandermeer in Twyckenham Notes (Issue 15, Spring 2022): “The Island, II”; “In the Hot Tub”; and “Breakfast at the Lake House”