2nd Place winner of The Poetry Lighthouse Prize Spring 2025
Cherry Seeds
by Joseph Howse
to Yelena
Last year, the cherry pits flew in an envelope,
got past customs somehow,
and spent an artificial winter in the fridge.
We split them with pliers,
potted the seeds, and grew them in the high windows.
We dabbed diluted milk
on their cherry-scented leaves to kill the mildew.
From end of summer
till mid-October, we hardened them off
for wind, night, and frost.
They prepped for transplant into greater Earth.
Then—ketamine snow.
We think four of them have survived
and it’s one way
to cut the odds of extinction
lest orchards
be felled by steel-cased shells.
Spring blossoms.
Joseph Howse
Hello! I’m Joseph, a writer, computer scientist, beekeeper, and orchardist. I live next door to a lighthouse on Canada’s Atlantic coast.
My biggest project is a series of novels called Next Year’s Snow, about a shifting and perilous relationship between two families in the Soviet and post-Soviet world. The debut, The Girl in the Water, won the 2023 Independent Press Award for Literary Fiction and the 2023 IAN Awards for Outstanding Multicultural Fiction. I am working on the sequel, The Circus and the Atom. You can read more about this series at https://nummist.com/stories/.
My smallest projects are haiku, which I sometimes write in my head while tending the honey bees and fruit trees. An “apricot blossoms” haiku of mine has won Third Prize in the New Zealand Poetry Society’s 2024 International Poetry Competition, Haiku Section, with publication forthcoming in the Society’s 2024 anthology.
Among my favourite writers are Baudelaire, Flaubert, Beckett, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Sergei Lebedev, and Xuemo. I feel a special respect for tragicomedy and for people who try to make their lives good for something even when they find that life is impossibly absurd. Navalny’s last letter from prison contains the following remark, which resonates with me: “Who could have told me that the darkest Russian writer is Chekhov?”
