Donna Fleischer
Last of August, 2020
A mild day moves in after steady heat. We take our seats outside at a café table for two, order a California ale made with guava, hibiscus, and strawberry. It’s the cherry-peach color some leaves become in the fall.
Across the street, people queue up in six-foot intervals in front of the post office, where two outdoor mailboxes with pull handles have been swapped out for ones with slots. Here in Connecticut, we’ve masked and worked remotely for months, stayed at home. We put a new ping-pong table in the foyer to take our minds off the daily deaths, the mass graves outside New York City, our friend who took her own life in April. She left just an abrupt note asking her friends to forgive her, that she had had a full life. Her favorite color was orange.
another round . . .
letting our masks slip
a while longer
About the Author
Donna Fleischer’s poetry books include from beyond my window: the Covid-19 Poems (Meritage Press, 2020) and < Periodic Earth > (Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press, 2016). Her poems appear in Autumn Moon Journal, Brass Bell, Contemporary Haibun, Kō, Marsh Hawk Press Review, Poets for Living Waters, Solitary Plover, and elsewhere. She lives with her wife and dog on a trap rock mountain ridge in Connecticut.
So gentle and loving
Dear Bessy Rey,
It’s important to me that you find it so. Thank you for taking time to let me know.
Kind regards,
Donna Fleischer
Your haiku , with a sense of prediction that more days will come till we find ourselves out of the tunnel, tightens up the prose . Stirred and then settling into the sedimentaion is my emotion. A well-written piece making the most of this literature form called haibun. Congratulations, dear Donna!
Dear Eiko Yakimoto,
Your deft reading of and writing about this haibun gives me supreme pleasure and joy, especially coming from you — that I have a long-standing admiration and profound enjoyment of your haibun, haiku, tanka, and renga adds to this wonderment! Rich Youmans, the haibun editor for this issue, gifted this haibun with a willingness to ask questions in a flowing give and take that brought the poem through to its final state.
With love,
Donna Fleischer