In the high desert near Los Angeles, in wildfire season, my folks would shout at us to grab the photo albums and other mysterious “things that couldn’t be replaced.” Rushing to gather the irreplaceable, loading the trunk in an emergency, came to feel like childhood’s perpetual condition.

linseed oil’s fishy smell 
mom’s lost paintings 
with me 

Dad would stand astride the roof hosing down the shingles (like it was the one thing that could save the house) and bark orders between hacking coughs. Then there were the screams of the horses we boarded in our dilapidated corral....

acid rain 
the way burning 
could sound   

A quarter century later, I lived on the eleventh floor of an old brick building in Manhattan. There was no fire escape, only a chimney-like brick stairwell. I’d look out my apartment’s window onto the rooftop of the neighboring building three stories down and imagine making the leap.

purple cacti 
heart with every step 
bursting into flames 

Thomas Festa

is a professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz, where he has been teaching for twenty years. He is the author of a poetry chapbook, Earthen (Finishing Line Press, 2023), and a study of John Milton’s poetry, The End of Learning (Routledge, 2006). His poems long and short have appeared in Bennington Review, Blithe Spirit, The Briar Cliff Review, Connecticut River Review, Contemporary Haibun Online, Frogpond, The Haibun Journal, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Modern Haiku, Presence, and elsewhere. His haibun have received a nomination for the Pushcart Prize and have been long-listed twice for the Touchstone Award.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Three Haiku by Thomas Festa in Autumn Moon Haiku Journal, Special Issue: Remembering Bruce Ross (9 March 2026)

⚡ Every Road Begins with a Door, haibun by Festa in contemporary haibun online 20.2 (August 2024)

⚡ Five Poems from Earthen by Thomas Festa at Moonlighting by Lit Pub: “On the Death of Miles Davis”; “Rowing to Innisfallen”; “Peregrine Question”; “Field Trip”; and “You of All”

⚡ Diptych, ekphrastic haibun in contemporary haibun online 19.2 (August 2023)

⚡ Haibun: A Guide for Writers by Roberta Beary, Lew Watts, and Rich Youmans, book review by Festa in Lightwood Magazine (21 September 2023)

⚡ “Bridges” by Thomas Festa, longlisted for the 2023 Touchstone Awards for Individual Haibun