withering fields 
another home harvested 
into the back seat 
 

1. Move to multiple states, alone, without knowing anyone who resides in that state.
   
   
2. Move 2,000 miles farther to be sure. You know she won’t get on a plane.
   
   
3. Don’t share contact info for any work locations. No phone number. No address. Lie if you have to. It’s the only way to build a life.
   
   
4. Move an additional 1500 miles as a precaution. Unpack when you run out of land. Stop only for oceans and foreign borders.
   
   
5. Eventually move back. Within a four-hour drive of her. Approach on tip-toe. It might take a decade or more to do this. A partner helps. A witness.
   
   
6. As she ages, move her to a nursing home a town away from where you are. It’s safer now. She can no longer drive. The nurses will be sure she takes her meds. Most of the time.
   
   

moonlit boxes 
I get back my security 
deposit 

Kat Lehmann

is a founding co-chief editor of whiptail: journal of the single-line poem. 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. Her haiku memoir, no matter how it ends a bluebird’s song, won the 2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize and The Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Distinguished Books Award 2025.

She is also the author of the sudo-ku collection to wade through the wind as a night Ghost City Press, 2025), helium moon (Origami Poetry Press, 2021), and three books published by 29 Trees: Stumbling Toward Happiness: Haibun and Hybrid Poems (2019), Small Stones from the River: Meditations and Micropoems (2017), and Moon Full of Moons (2015).

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. She lives in Connecticut with her family.

For a more comprehensive list of her publications and prizes, see her profile at Poets & Writers: https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/kat_lehmann

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 31 of Kat’s haibun; one of her cheribun; and two of her collaborative micro-poems (with Bryan Rickert).