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| Issue 34: | Sept. 2026 |
| Cheribun: | 145 words |
By Colleen M. Farrelly
Monday Blues
Google suggests a glut of synonyms. A cerulean sky. The cyan of his Lycra shorts. The indigo of a rainbow while sprinting through a sudden squall. Even the azure of an outer reef skirting La Jolla. But I don’t need a color palette to coordinate my outfit. Just a word origin. An online dictionary tries to guess what I mean:
- ocean hues on a clear day
- onshore, a harmonica solo
interrupts a soul ballad - now, the flutter
of Lycaenidae wings atop
his headstone
Legend has it that sailors centuries before us flew flags after a captain’s death. I sport a navy-blue skirt while I talk to him—quietly, quickly—and, per Memorial Day custom, leave a dime for his family to know we once worked together. I close my eyes and imagine him carving sapphire surf somewhere off Valhalla.
—Long-listed Finalist in MacQ’s Cheribun Challenge #4
Publisher’s Note:
“The Meaning Behind Coins on Military Graves” at Wounded Warrior Project (link reconfirmed in September 2026):
https://newsroom.woundedwarriorproject.org/The-Meaning-Behind-Coins-on-Military-Graves
Colleen M. Farrelly
is a mathematician, poet, and haibun/cheribun scholar who lives in Miami, Florida, and enjoys being a digital nomad. Her first full-length poetry collection, The Haibun Laboratory, will be released by Cuttlefish Press this summer. Her writing is forthcoming in About Place Journal, Consequence Forum, and MoonPark Review; and has appeared in cattails journal, Contemporary Haibun Online, #FemkuMag, Frogpond, Haibun Today, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Modern Haiku, The Other Bunny, Under the Bashō, and Wales Haiku Journal among others.
Two of her haibun were nominated by #FemkuMag for the Pushcart Prize. Her work has been nominated for Touchstone and Dwarf Star Awards, has won honorable mention in several contests, and appears in telling the bees: The Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku 2024.
Dozens of her papers on computational mathematics have been published, and she’s co-author of two mathematics textbooks: with Yaè Ulrich Gaba, The Shape of Data: Geometry-Based Machine Learning and Data Analysis in R (San Francisco: No Starch Press, 2023); and with Franck Kalala Mutombo, Modern Graph Theory Algorithms with Python (UK: Packt Publishing, 2024).
More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond
⚡ Cheribun: A Craft Perspective by Colleen M. Farrelly in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 33, August 2026)
⚡ Engaging the head and the heart: why scientists turn to poetry by Josie Glausiusz in Nature (8 April 2026); Colleen M. Farrelly is among the scientists who “use verse to visualize complex problems or translate the wonders of science for wider audiences.”
⚡ The Haibun Zoo: A Guide to Current Rare Haibun Forms by Farrelly in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 30X, December 2025)
⚡ Weathering the Storm, a sci-bun by Farrelly in Rattle Poets Respond (30 September 2025)
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