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MacQueen’s Quinterly: Knock-your-socks-off Art and Literature
Issue 33: August 2026
Cheribun: 62 words
By Joshua St. Claire

Enchiridion

 
perhaps 
my parents 
are right 
to warn me off 
the book of Bosch 
that flames my heart 
in purple and scarlet 
I’m just a boy 
and they know quite well 
I’ve already seen 
through the gaping 
maw of hell 
or perhaps 
they merely 
suspect 

both particle and wave 

the infrared of my lips 
bending spacetime 
as I speak it 

narcissus 
poeticus 

 

—Short-listed Finalist in MacQ’s Cheribun Challenge #4

Joshua St. Claire
Issue 33 (August 2026)

is a certified public accountant, financial reporting director for a non-profit, and an award-winning haiku poet who lives in Pennsylvania and brews a mean espresso.

His haiku, haibun, and related poems have been published broadly, including in Contemporary Haibun Online, Drifting Sands Haibun, Frogpond Journal, hedgerow, The Heron’s Nest, Lothlorian Poetry Journal, MacQueen’s Quinterly, MAYFLY (haiku magazine), Modern Haiku, Notre Dame Review, and Rattle, among others.

His work has received recognition in the following international contests and awards: British Haiku Society Award 2025 (Haiku Section, Honorable Mention), Haiku Society of America Gerald M. Brady Memorial Senryu Award 2022 (First Place), Modern Haiku Robert Speiss Memorial Award 2024 (Honorable Mention), San Francisco International Award for Senryu 2023 (Third Place), The Touchstone Awards for Individual Haiku 2022 (shortlisted), the Trailblazer Award 2023 (Haiku), and the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Invitational 2023 (Honorable Mention).

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

Ten Haiku by Joshua St. Claire in Lothlorian Poetry Journal (12 March 2025)

[his smile] by St. Claire in Rattle Poets Respond (29 September 2024)

Haibun on John Ashbery’s Haibun 6 by St. Claire in The temz Review (Fall-Winter 2023)

 
 
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