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| Issue 32: | June 2026 |
| Haibun: | 112 words |
By Sherry Reniker
The Aphant in the House
An apple, plump and red ... or a swallowtail twirling in blue.... The colors, shapes, the vapor trails. Can you picture them inside your head? Just imagine. Not everyone can.
aphantasia: a blind mind’s eye
Is this why I (and perhaps you) don’t think like the 96 percent? Discovered in 1880, a neurological condition since 2015: only one to four percent of us are aphants. We don’t see images in our minds, but feel them with sixth and seventh senses.
In a dream, at the Library of Congress, checking out Beckett’s Imagination Dead Imagine, and all the pages are blank.
haiku— can’t see it the way they do
Publisher’s Notes:
Links below were retrieved on 29 May 2026.
- British neurologist Adam Zeman and his colleagues at the University of Exeter coined the term “aphantasia” in 2015 to describe the inability to voluntarily create mental images. While they identified it as a condition, many medical experts now view aphantasia as a neurological variation in information processing. Aphants often use conceptual, verbal, and/or spatial thinking, rather than visual imagery, in order to imagine. In other words, just as being left-handed is a trait rather than a disability, aphantasia is a variation in how the mind works rather than a medical condition. For details, see this pair of articles:
“What is aphantasia? A conceptual articulation and empirical evaluation” by Joel J. Lorenzatti in Neuropsychologia (Vol. 226, 6 June 2026, 109431):
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0028393226000771?via%3Dihub
“Aphantasia within the framework of neurodivergence...” by Merlin Monzel et al in Consciousness and Cognition (Vol. 115, October 2023, 103567):
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053810023001046 - October 2015: “Jamie Murphy at The Salvage Press in Dublin has published a new edition of Samuel Beckett’s Imagination Dead Imagine, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of its release in 1965.” From “Graphic Arts Collection” in Special Collections, Firestone Library, Princeton University:
https://graphicarts.princeton.edu/2015/10/05/50th-anniversary-of-becketts-imagination-dead-imagine/
Sherry Reniker
is a retired professor and editor who lives near Seattle. Though she has written poetry for many years, she began writing haiku in 2022 and haibun more recently. Her haiku have appeared in Asahi Haikuist Network (AHN is David McMurray’s column in The Asahi Shimbun newspaper); Chrysanthemum; Cold Moon Journal; Failed Haiku; Five Fleas Itchy Poetry; Glimmering Hour: Haiku Northwest 35th Anniversary Anthology [2024]; Haiku Girl Summer; haikuKATHA; Leaf: Journal of The Daily Haiku; Pan Haiku Review; Shadow Pond Journal; smols poetry journal (spj features ultra-shorts, five words max!); The Solitary Daisy; tinywords; tsuri-dōrō; and Under the Bashō.
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