A child pyro with easy access to ashtrays. Smell of smoke ubiquitous. Mesmerized by flare and sulphurous flash. Burning matches held until fingers sting. Child pyro grows up in a world that burns, the sting now an ache, an ache of how and why that burns from the inside out while outside the smell of wet wood fire pit smoke pools in the low spot in the neighborhood and every breath brings an acrid blackness to lungs, even the trees forced to breathe the last gasp of their kin. Child pyro orphaned by lung cancers, never addicted, planting for possibility in a future free from fire.
A child mesmerized by
flare and flash
grows up
outside
in the neighborhood,
the trees their kin,
possibility a future fire.
a flare grows –
up in the trees
fire
©Mary Lee Hahn, 2025
What a doozy of a Poetry Sisters Challenge this month! The Poetry Foundation article about this form (invented by poet torrin a. greathouse) states:
A burning haibun must be composed of three (or more) parts—an initial prose poem, an erasure of that prose poem, and an erasure of the previous erasure down to a haiku. Additional segments of erasure may be integrated, but keep in mind the continuity of the piece.
The erasures are intended to be sequential and persistent. Once a piece of text has been blacked out, or burned away, it should not return. Furthermore, each erasure should represent some form of reorientation from the previous section, altering the meaning, tone, etcetera.
The focus of a burning haibun—in contrast to traditional haibun—should be on an interior landscape, by which I mean the landscape of memory. Though the form emerged from a meditation upon the contours of traumatic memory, you should by no means feel confined to writing within that space.
Somewhere within the poem’s text, something must burn.
What the Poetry Foundation doesn’t state is how tricky these are to write! Do you start with a mind-dump that becomes some kind of prose poem (whatever that is) that gets burned up as sequentially as the above quote would have you believe? Or do you start with a haiku and reverse-engineer the whole thing? Or do you write a paragraph, make it as weird as possible so as to seem like a prose poem, then pull a haiku out, go back and burn up the middle section, only to realize when you go to make the images for your post that you have broken the rules by using words you burned in the middle section for your haiku and have to start over again with the second two parts? (You might infer which of these processes was mine…)
I can’t wait to see what the other Poetry Sisters created!
Tanita @ {fiction, instead of lies}
Laura @ Laura Purdie Salas
Tricia @ The Miss Rumphius Effect
Sara @ Read Write Believe
Liz @ Liz Garton Scanlon
Jone has this week’s Halloween Poetry Friday roundup at Jone Rush MacCulloch.
The fire in my images is via Unsplash.
A(nother) Year of Reading 
Wow! What a powerful distillation of the original. I started a burning haibun and abandoned ship. It IS tricky. I skittered right back to simple rhyme and form. But, look at you with that flare…that FLARE in autumn. Perfect. Absolutely perfect in all the layers (or should I say rings?)
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Mary Lee, you mastered the twist from poem to poem, each one lighting a new insight, until that perfect ending. Wow. I’m glad you had trees for kin, and it appears that they blessed you with resilience and wisdom.
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I loooooove this form, which I have not tried, but as far as I know we should be attributing the form to queer poet torrin a. greathouse. Is the first text really yours, ML? It’s very different than anything I’ve seen you write–isn’t it? This is hard to read on the heels of reports from the trial involving the 6yo who shot his teacher in VA. The middle erasure is, well, 🔥🔥🔥.
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Yes, that is the correct (and neglected) attribution.
Yes, that first text really is mine. It sounded like me in the first draft and then I followed the advice of some meme or another that I saw recently that encouraged me to keep being weird…actually, to be WEIRDER THAN EVER. So I leaned into my inner weirdness and that’s what happened. lol.
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Like Heidi, the first poem doesn’t feel like your voice. It’s so scary. On this Halloween Day, you’ve pulled off an incredible feat from pyro child to gorgeous flames in the trees.
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See my note to Heidi about the voice in the prose poem…
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“Mesmerized by flash and flare”!!!! I ADORE THAT. Here’s what I think is most beautiful about yours, Mary Lee:You really do transform the fire — from addiction to beauty, from loss to discovery, from inside to outside. It’s kind of a miracle!
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Like Liz’s comment, I agree you mastered the transition of poems and brought newness to each poem that follows. I especially like the ending haiku, the change in focus there. I almost used your exact words about it being a doozy. I also like the cleanness of your presentation, I didn’t have time to create that—very fuel-filled and powerful!
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Mary Lee, your three flares-to-near-embers, iterations & conflagration of the fire theme Haibun are brilliant-sparked & now parked in my “ToDo” universe. If. I. Dare. So sad about the burned lungs of his parents orphaning him. The character feels real. Your fan,JAN
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Jan, I’m thrilled that you read into this a character and not an autobiography! That tells me I made my prose poem weird enough that I wrote myself out to the furthest margins. Success!
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Mary Lee, that is amazing, what you’ve done here. What a difficult form, and yet you’ve aced it! Dang. Burning haibuns make a perfect Halloween theme, too. I have a similarly themed found poem that I need to recheck for copyright issues, and your piece here reminds me to take another look at it.
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Compelling and brilliantly done! I’m seeing how this form has unearthed unexpected, subconscious and yes, weird, thoughts of poets I “thought” I knew . . . 🙂
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…even the trees forced to breathe the last gasp of their kin.
That is brutal. And so true. And, as Sara remarked with reference to my poem, even the memories burn – those lungs, never addicted, orphaned by lung cancers in the most painful of ironies. The child addicted to both flash and flare, its addictive stinging is also kin to trees. Wow. This is written in flame and cinders and really puts the erasure and distillation of the form to sterling use. Brava.
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Enjoyed the progressive refinement of your words in the successive poems, Mary Lee. You distilled your words in an artful fashion. Flaming fabulous…
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I love the transformation from beginning to end of the child pyro and “a flare grows up”!
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As I’ve read others who have “burned”, too, I begin to realize that each touches in such personal ways. I read your words and felt sad, so grumpy that many never acknowledge the hurt, and now you have so masterfully, Mary Lee.
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Mary Lee, genius reorientation from part to part — wow!
And I had to smile when I read this:
“…only to realize when you go to make the images for your post that you have broken the rules by using words you burned in the middle section for your haiku and have to start over again with the second two parts?”
because I kept tinkering with mine and because I can NOT leave my writing alone, I found myself revising and then messing up what I’d burned, what became the haiku, etc. (and I was reverse-engineering, which theoretically should be a little easier?)
Anyway, I love what you did here and love the powerful images (“mesmerized by/flare and flash”). Beautifully done!
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This is really powerful, Mary Lee. I can see the work it took. I’m fascinated with the form.
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I love how you leaned into your weirdness to create your prose poem and how that led you onward through the next two iterations. What a fascinating and aptly named form, and one you crafted masterfully! By the way, I was stopped in my tracks by ” even the trees forced to breathe the last gasp of their kin.”
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I’m back for 2 reasons: 1) in my haste to attribute I mischaracterized Torrin who identifies as a lot of things but not queer! and 2) I got so inspired that I had to try my own (had not dared before) and cheated a little by using a poem from 2017 to start. I’m not sure I got the pivots & development in, but it’s a first go. https://photos.app.goo.gl/2o8WUK4TaWgwJUhKA Thanks for the inspo!
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LOVELOVELOVE! Brilliant! (Pun intended. Let’s plan to get drinks 🙂
Thanks for the clarification. I edited my edit.
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Holy heck, Mary Lee! “even the trees forced to breathe the last gasp of their kin.” The violence and destruction were mesmerizing–a black hole of fire (I know, an impossibility) and inevitability. It’s shocking, and now I’m pondering the transformation in your poems. You really worked those pivots!
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