Hot News: Chen-ou Liu's Poems Featured in Haibun Today and VerseWrights

My Dear Friends:

My haibun below is featured in Haibun Today, 8:3, September 2014:

A Room of His Own

In the poems we reveal ourselves. In prose others. -- Phyllis Webb, Notebook, 1969-1973

cold moonlight

books of poetry

stacked floor to ceiling

Hearing of my housemate's suicide was like being stabbed in the back with a sharp knife, and yet I barely knew him.  Only his work and the scratching sounds of pencil on paper that came from his room. "His noisy silence (in an emphatic tone) hangs over us like a long, dark cloud," one of my other housemates once said to me.

drafts of old poems

on the water-stained wall

a starry sky

One week before his death, I was standing on the edge of the table hanging a clock, when he passed through the living room.  He suddenly turned to me, saying, “I have this insatiable urge to commit pencil to paper. It soothes my soul." He went back to his room and continued to spin poems out of the gathering darkness.

Read Ruth Holzer's in-depth thematic and structural analysis, titled "On Chen-ou Liu's 'A Room of His Own'," which was first published in Haibun Today, 8:3, September 2014.

And my haiku and tanka are featured on VerseWrights today. Below are my new poems posted on its homepage:

blood-stained lily...

I lock her secret

in a haiku

a white butterfly

flying from branch to branch

thoughts of my ex

inside the church

the congregation praying

under Jesus' gaze

two Romani women

in the trash-littered square

looking out a window

across Lake Ontario

the aroma

of crucian carp soup

fills the gaps in my heart

(Note: Crucian carp soup is one of China’s favorite dishes)

Thanks for your continued support of my writing.

Chen-ou