TANKA TAKE HOME — 21st January '26 Featuring poet: Cherie Hunter Day

hosts: Firdaus Parvez, Kala Ramesh, Priti Aisola & Suraja Menon Roychowdhury

Introducing a new perspective to our  Wednesday Feature!

21st January, 2026

poet of the month: Cherie Hunter Day

Land’s End

The county road peters out in the parking lot of a lobster pound, but the land keeps going, jutting into the bay. To get to the summer cottages visitors travel a double-rutted dirt road that narrows to a single mud-packed path around boulders on the final approach to the mud flats. Beyond a sandy spit granite ledges hold the last accumulation of soil. It’s enough to support the salt-sprayed and wind-pruned sumac and bayberry bushes to the height of a grade school child, not even the tallest in her class.

saving bits of shell

from the beach where we scattered

her ashes

the tint of red in the shale

bleeding iron

police sirens

color the late afternoon

with urgency

a cicada separates

from its wingless skin

hedgerow #142 (2023)

smudges of moth

remain on the white wall

until morning

when I can wipe away death

with a clean cloth

Mariposa 45 (2021)

Cherie, we thank you warmly for sharing your poems and your thoughtful responses to our questions.

More about the poet:

Cherie Hunter Day poet, editor, illustrator, graphic artist, and collagist. She began writing tanka in 1993 and her first tanka chapbook, Sun, Moon, Mother, Father was published in 1997. Her work has appeared in tanka anthologies such as Wind Five-Folded (1994), In a Ship’s Wake (2001), The Tanka Anthology (2003), Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka, Vol. 1, Vol. 2, and Vol. 4 (2009 – 2012), Tanka 2020 (2020), and journals including: Five Lines Down, Tangled Hair, red lights, American Tanka, Ribbons, Skylark, Presence, and hedgerow. In 1999 her collection, Early Indigo won the Snapshot Press Tanka Collection Award and was published in 2000. A book of responsive tanka with David Rice, Kindle of Green, followed in 2008. In 2012 she won the Snapshot Press eChapbook Award for A Color for Leaving, which was released in 2017. Her most recent collection, A House Meant Only for Summer (2023), contains haibun and tanka prose. She lives in Auburn, New Hampshire with her husband and son.

5.

TTH: Can you give any advice to someone wanting to write and publish tanka? As an editor what are you looking for in a tanka that makes it most likely to get published?

As an editor I look for authenticity and fresh juxtaposition. My advice is: don’t try to write like anyone else. Some believe that there are only four to eight basic human emotions. Other researchers suggest that there are 27 distinct emotions along a continuous gradient. In Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown identifies 87 emotions and experiences. Some even suggest humans can experience over 34,000 emotions. There’s lots of territory for tanka.

Your Challenge This Week:

Cherie's tanka and tanka prose talk about lingering shades. The hint of red, maybe blood, on the rocks; echoes of police sirens; the smudge from a dead moth.

Write about hints- echoes, tinges, lingering scents...

Have fun!

And remember – tanka, because of those two extra lines, lends itself most beautifully when revealing a story. And tanka prose is storytelling.

Give these ideas some thought and share your tanka and tanka-prose with us here. Keep your senses open, observe things that happen around you and write. You can post tanka and tanka-prose outside of these themes as well.

PLEASE NOTE

1. Post only one poem at a time, only one per day.

2. Only 2 tanka and two tanka-prose per poet per prompt.

Tanka art, of course, if you want to.

3. Share your best-polished pieces.

4. Please do not post something in a hurry or something you have just written. Let it simmer for a while.

5. Post your final edited version on top of your original verse.

6. Don't forget to give feedback on others' poems.

We are delighted to open the comment thread for you to share your unpublished tanka and tanka-prose (within 250 words) to be considered for inclusion in the haikuKATHA monthly magazine.