She makes sure to drop her small complaints about your behavior right before she takes your blood pressure. But you’re still not sure whether she’s an aide or a nurse. You don’t even know her name because although she wears her badge close to her heart, she never turns it face up for you to see. In other words, you have no clue why she thinks it’s okay for her to claim she cares for you. That she wishes nothing but the best for you. Truly.

searching 

to find a way 
through darkness 

I count 
my blessings instead 
of sheep 

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

Margaret Dornaus

holds an MFA degree in the translation of poetry from the University of Arkansas. Her short-form and free verse poetry appears in numerous journals and anthologies, including Contemporary Haibun Online, I-70 Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Minyan Magazine, Naugatuck Review, ONE ART, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Silver Birch Poetry. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, she received a Haiku Society of America Merit Book Award in 2017 for Prayer for the Dead: Collected Haibun & Tanka Prose (Singing Moon Press, 2016). And as founding editor of Singing Moon Press, she feels privileged to have published several short-form anthologies, including Behind the Mask: Haiku in the Time of Covid-19.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ MacQ’s [First] Cheribun Challenge for which Margaret Dornaus served as Guest Judge, in Issue 12 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (March 2022); First through Third Place Winners include Judge’s Commentary.

⚡ “The Writer’s Cabin” (plus Poet’s Commentary) by Margaret Dornaus is the first cheribun to appear in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 11, January 2022)—and apparently the first to be published anywhere online. (Poet ai li, who founded the cherita form in 1997, coined the term “cheribun” yet does not publish this hybrid in her journal The Cherita.)

⚡ Index of Contributors, with links to two dozen poems by Dornaus that appear here in MacQueen’s Quinterly, including cheribun, haibun, haiku sequence, prose poems, tanka prose, and a tanku sonnet.