Photo: Salvadonica Borgo del Chianti/Creative Commons/Flickr

Middle-aged women and younger men meet up in a haiku by Angela Leuck in today’s feature of the International Women’s Haiku Festival.

antipasto –
middle-aged women
eyeing younger men

Here, cougars lick their chops on the veldt of sexual politics.  That Leuck’s “middle-aged women” only “eye” the “younger men” seems to toy with the transgressive notion of a woman of mothering age indulging her sexual appetite with someone possibly young enough to be her child.  But when you consider that the “antipasto” is the appetizer one indulges in before the main course, this senryu suggests that the women might do more than “eye” the men as the “meal” progresses.

Angela Leuck’s work has been published in journals and anthologies around the world.   An award-winning poet, she is the author of More Grows in a Crooked Row (inkling, 2016), Garden Meditations and A Cicada in the Cosmos (inkling, 2009), and Flower Heart (Blue Ginkgo, 2006).  She has also edited numerous anthologies, including Rose Haiku for Flower Lovers and Gardeners (Price-Patterson, 2005), Tulip Haiku (Shoreline, 2004), and, with Maxianne Berger, Sun Through the Blinds: Montreal Haiku Today (Shoreline, 2003). She lives in Hatley, Quebec.