Tuesday, 5 May 2026

2 Poems by Joshua St. Claire

Night Haiku

3:00 AM moon
crossing the empty road
a black dog

convincing myself
they must be fox’s screams
witching hour

last light through amber grain

old pond
this bit of flint
ripples the Milky Way

plum hour
here we are
waiting for death

skunk hour
the iron taste of blood
in my mouth

Nembus
the sound of maple leaves
flowing to the Chesapeake

Susquehanna dusk
                         the rushing across it

squinting his eyes
as he blows out cigarette smoke
the crescent moon



Cloud Haiku

slate sky
a laughing gull traces
the curve of whitecaps

Queen Anne’s lace clouds of thistleseed across the meadow

grey clouds leaves

stratus radiatus reaching the skeleton birches

cloudshadow rushing south
across the Appalachians
last moths

Susquehanna fog I slip back into solipsism

mackerel clouds
the as-far-as-the-eye-can-see
of the Appalachians

cirrostratus but not a single persimmon

the altostratus sky
to all five directions
road salt

stratocumulus sun
two crows gleaning
buck bones


Bionote

Joshua St. Claire is an accountant from a small town in Pennsylvania who works as a financial director for a non-profit. His haiku and related poetry have been published broadly including in Frogpond, Modern Haiku, The Heron’s Nest, and Mayfly. He has received recognition in the following international contests/awards for his work in these forms: the Gerald Brady Memorial Senryu Award, the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Invitational, the San Francisco International Award for Senryu, the Robert Speiss Memorial Award, the Touchstone Award for Individual Haiku, the British Haiku Society Award for Haiku, and the Trailblazer Award.

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