YOU'RE INVITED TO PEEP AT THE SECOND PUBLICATION FROM 147 MILLION ORPHANS!

I'm grateful to Lynn Behrendt and Anne Gorrick for asking me to participate in their latest "Peep Show" issue #4 with the theme "ABOUT WOMEN 2"! Said theme is timely given the VIDA reminder of how counting occurs to note who counts, note the curators.

Anyway, I'm delighted to have in such a venue some excerpts from my ongoing project, "147 MILLION ORPHANS: A HAYBUN". Do go HERE to peep at what I'm currently exploring through poetry. Other excerpts from the same project are available at The Brooklyn Rail. I am loving this project because it's very close-to-heart, per the project's "Notes":

"147 million" is a common estimate for the number of orphans worldwide. A “haybun” is a combination of hay(na)ku and other text. The hay(na)ku is a 21st century diasporic poetic form whose core is a tercet-based stanza with the first line being one word, the second line being two words, and the third line being three words. Each word forming a hay(na)ku in “147 MILLION ORPHANS” is listed chronologically from an 8th grade project by the poet’s adopted son, Michael, to learn English by studying 25 new words a week.