THE HAIBUN GALLERY: 01 August 2024 — featured poet — Rich Youmans (Touchstone Award winner, 2023)

hosts: Vidya Shankar & Shalini Pattabiraman

A Thursday Feature.

poet of the week: Rich Youmans

01 August 2024

This month at The Haibun Gallery, instead of featuring a poet all through August, we are bringing to you each week, one of the four Touchstone Award 2023 winning poets. The first in the series is Rich Youmans and his winning haibun, What’s Underneath, published in MacQueen’s Quinterly Issue 19.

About Rich Youmans:

Rich has been writing haiku, haibun, and related essays for nearly 40 years and still wonders where the time went. From 2018 to 2019 he served on the editorial team of Haibun Today, and in 2020 he became editor in chief of contemporary haibun online and its related print anthology, contemporary haibun. His books include Shadow Lines (Katsura Press, 2000), a collection of linked haibun with Margaret Chula; an e-chapbook, All the Windows Lit (Snapshot Press, 2017); and Head-On: Haibun Stories. (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2018). He is also the co-author, with Roberta Beary and Lew Watts, of Haibun: A Writer's Guide (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2023), which recently won the Haiku Society of America's Merit Book Award for Best Prose Book. He lives on Cape Cod in Massachusetts with his wife, Alice.

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What’s Underneath

—Rich Youmans (MacQueen’s Quinterly Issue 19)

Bianca lays out the cake just as her father is wheeled into the dining room. The orderly pats his shoulder — “Happy Birthday, Mr. Gorman” — before slipping back into the busy corridor. Bianca cuts a slice of cake, taking care to capture a creme rosette.1

1. After Mom died, I read through her diaries and found the entry about how, in her fifth month, she hung wallpaper with pink roses in my soon-to-be nursery. She had seen the ultrasound, something you refused to look at or believe. It’s going to be a boy, you insisted. She underlined that, noting how important that was for you, to have a son. That night, after too many shots of whiskey, you ripped everything down; I pictured strips of paper cowering along the baseboards. The next day Mom painted the room white. A fresh start.

in utero

her prayer mingles

with votive shadows

Bianca slides the cake onto a plate and places it before her father. Next to it she lays a thin package wrapped in blue2 foil.

2. That was your color. I still see you strutting around the house in your jeans and faded work-shirts, smelling of sawdust and nicotine. Even your eyes were blue — a cold blue whenever you looked at me. Sundays you’d watch football with the other men on our block. Sometimes they’d bring their sons and I could see it on your face, the way it darkened. Or at dinner, when Mom asked me about school, how you just ate in silence as I talked about my girlfriends — Jenny’s new sweater, the charms on Cindy’s bracelet. When you started to stab at your meat I knew to stop.

late sun

every shadow straining

to break free

His eyes narrow.3

3. I remember that look, your eyebrows lowering like storm clouds. I saw it that afternoon I tried to have a catch with Jimmy. He had been next door in his backyard, throwing himself popups. I was taking down Mom’s dresses from the clothesline. He called out to me — “Bianca, throw me a few flies” — and tossed over the ball. I tried, but my throw barely made it over the fence. That’s when you appeared, your eyes two slits. You grabbed the ball and began throwing Jimmy pitches that disappeared into his glove. Smack. Smack. His eyes lit up. So did yours.

twilight blue . . .

in the first star

a second chance

He pokes the package as if it were a wounded animal.4

4. Of course, Jimmy had to bring you that stray mutt he’d found. By then, you and he had become inseparable. He’d come over while you were tuning the Chevy, and you’d teach him how to change a spark plug. When his mother bought him a new baseball mitt, you both oiled it and wrapped it with twine, the ball a small fist in its pocket. Then he found that mutt, its matted fur the color of tar. You both washed him, gave him water. Jimmy’s mother, Mrs. Foley — Roselyn, you called her — came over later and couldn’t thank you enough. She had long red hair and a too-big laugh. One evening, after you left again for the pub, I asked Mom if Jimmy had a dad. She just shook her head real quick.

diary entry

between each line

the sound of rain

With a quick tug, Bianca tears off5 the wrapping.

5. I learned how easily things can be stripped away, that day you drove off in the moving van with Jimmy and Roselyn. After that, you were only a cramped signature on a monthly check. That’s when I started to keep a diary, just like Mom. I wrote page after page — first wondering, then pleading, then spitting hate. Every photo I could find of you I tore up. Except for that one of us on the Atlantic City boardwalk, sitting on a bench. I was three, sitting on Mom’s lap, my face looking up in wonder. You sat stiffly beside her, your hair close cropped. I wondered who took the shot — no doubt someone Mom hailed over. I kept it because of how young she looked. How she kept one hand around my waist, my palm wrapped around her raised thumb. How with her free hand she cradled your cheek. In that moment you looked like a lost boy.

waking from a dream

and yet . . .

morning moon

The light from the chandelier shimmers on a white6 box.

6. That was always Mom’s favorite color. After high school, when I worked in Mitchell’s Floral Shop, I brought home snowdrops, daisies, white roses. Anything to make her brighten. When she started to lose weight I’d buy her creme donuts from Mrs. Fillari’s bakery, where her son Matthew always slipped me an extra cruller. By then you were living upstate, although we weren’t sure where — the return addresses on the checks changed every few months. Summer evenings she and I would sit on the porch in those frayed lawn chairs that you and she had as furniture in your first apartment. Mom bundled a blanket around herself even in the height of August humidity. Sometimes we’d just stare at the sky and she’d tell me stories. Of you. How you loved to go camping with your father and grandfather when you were a boy. How they had taught you to be hard, a man, but still you sang to her at your wedding, your voice as tender as a silk ribbon. How things had been fine until she became pregnant. I’d feel my face tighten, but Mom would touch my hand. Bianca, don’t hate your father, she’d tell me, over and over. Until she couldn’t.

moonrise

adding one more

stone to her cairn

Bianca touches his cheek.7 “Happy birthday, Daddy,” she says.

7. Funny, when the hospital called, the first thing I thought of was the Atlantic City photo. Matthew and I had moved to the coast, and I was working at a motel that overlooked the bay. It was winter, and I spent most nights checking in one-hour lovers and listening to the Spanish songs of off-season families. Somehow I wasn’t surprised that I was your emergency contact. You had written a few times after Roselyn left you, a handful of crammed words about your latest job and how you hoped to see me soon. The paper always carrying the scent of nicotine. I tore up the letters just like I did all those old photos. Well, almost all. Will you come to take your father? Outside in the courtyard, someone was singing a song with my name in the chorus, and something inside me fell away. It took me a moment to realize the nurse couldn’t hear my head nodding.

storm clouds

break — every wave

spreading moonlight

Bianca lifts the lid. His eyes widen.8

8. Matthew got the same look when I told him I wanted you to live with us. After all that he did? he kept saying, over and over. I had told him everything, of course, including how the police found you in the doorway of your walkup, the left side of your face drooping like a Dali painting. And how lost you looked when I saw you in the hospital after all those years — your good blue eye tearing up, your crumpled face so weak in the last of the sun’s light. All I could think of in that moment was Mom. Her words. Her touch. Her painting those walls.

new diary

the first word’s

weight

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VS: What I find most interesting about this haibun is how the third person narrative and the first-person narrative of the prose blend smoothly, and how the interspersed ku flow as one with the varied POVs. Also, the indexes linking ordinary statements in the third person narrative to the key background details in the first-person narrative makes this haibun deserving of the award. The style is not just innovative but it also allows the layers to the poem, justifying the title, ‘What’s Underneath’.

Congratulations, once again, Rich. I have read your haibun a few times already and will read it again. We are interested in knowing something about the writing process of this particular haibun. Why this braiding of different POVs?     

RY: Thank you, Vidya. I wanted What’s Underneath to, on the surface, describe a rather mundane event—a daughter celebrating an elderly parent's birthday, in which nothing much happens except they have cake and a gift is presented. But, like any moment in time, so much history resides behind it; that's where the action is, and that's the story I wanted to tell. What better way than by allowing seemingly innocuous details to spark memories that are captured in each footnote, so the reader can see how this pleasant celebration is actually freighted with a fraught history? At first I presented the birthday story as one continuous piece, with the footnotes clumped together underneath. That led to too much fragmentation—readers would tend to read about the birthday celebration first, then attach the footnotes if assembling a puzzle. Interweaving the two stories created a better narrative flow, and keeping the lines short in the "surface" story allowed the haibun/footnotes to carry that narrative, with each have contributing key points.

VS: At a time when the writing world is moving towards minimalism, you come out with a haibun that is pretty long. What do you have to say to that?

RY: Well, the story I wanted to tell—a relationship's span over decades, one that ultimately ended in forgiveness and a new start—required a bit of space (although, really, I did try to write as concisely as possible). Actually, all of this year's Touchstone winner weren't what I would call minimalistic, so maybe the other authors would share my opinion: trends come and go, but writers have to tell their specific stories, and do it in a way that most engages the reader. If it can be said minimally, that's fine. If it needs more room, that's fine too. I'd hate to see any writer feel constrained by whatever the writing world may be doing at a given moment.

Prompt for members:

Forgiveness heals. Especially the one who forgives. And when healing happens, it marks a new birth. Rich's haibun also has other themes. Explore them all and give us a poem with a fresh outlook.

Haibun outside this prompt can also be posted! Remember, we are in the month of August and India has a lot to celebrate in August besides our Independence Day.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Important: Since we're swamped with submissions, and our editors are only human, mistakes can happen. Please, please, remember to put your name, followed by your country, below each poem, even after revisions. It helps our editors; they won't have to type it in, saving them from potential typos. Thanks a ton!

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