Some of us had the recent experience of noticing that a man (a father?) was showing a girl (his daughter?) a copy of Upstate Dim Sum, which is available in the Tai Pan Restaurant. He seemed to be explaining something to her in detail and, as they turned together through the pages, we regretted that we were too far away to catch any of the words. How pleasant to entertain the hope, whether founded or not, that the warmth of a few sparks we have struck among ourselves might catch somewhere else and similarly warm the lives of others.

For our guest poet in this issue, we have reached farther than usual and, in a sense, stayed closer to home. Ion Codrescu lives in Romania on the Black Sea coast. He is an artist and writer who has published books in Romania, France, Great Britain and Slovenia. For ten years he was the editor of Albatross, an international haiku journal published in Romanian and English. He is the founder of the Constantza Haiku Society and the Constantza international Haiku Festival in Romania. Ion is a natural choice as our guest, both because he is one of our favorite writers, and also because he and his wife, Mihaela, were literally our guests at Tai Pan, in 2001 when they were in the United States for the Haiku North America conference.

tourists ignoring

the story of the ruins

their dog sniffs

our tires

someone knows

more than the tour guide

steering

between the lines

not a word

since the last exit