Prairie Zen and the World That Doesn't Need Fixing

Prairie Zen is not really interested in escape.

There is no requirement to leave the city, climb a mountain, enter a monastery, or discover some landscape human beings haven't already complicated. Prairie Zen starts wherever you happen to be: beside a road, behind an abandoned building, at the edge of an orchard, looking into a cracked birdbath.

What matters is the quality of attention brought to the place.

Much of modern life teaches us to look at the world and immediately ask what should be done with it. Land should be developed. Buildings should be occupied. Broken things should be replaced. Weeds should be removed. Problems should be solved. Even nature becomes something to manage, improve, photograph, preserve, monetize, or explain.

Prairie Zen asks a quieter question:

What if, for a moment, we didn't fix anything?

These five haiku all encounter worlds that are damaged, abandoned, imperfect, or simply beyond our control. None asks the world to become something else.

1.

cracked birdbath—
the sparrows drinking
from several skies

Illustration by Tré from Vanished Roads by Thomas L. Vaultonburg

 

The birdbath is broken. That is the human assessment of the situation.

The sparrows apparently weren't consulted.

The cracks divide the reflected sky into fragments, transforming a defect into multiplicity: not one sky, but several. Nothing about the birdbath has actually been repaired. The poem simply changes what we're capable of seeing.

That's central to Prairie Zen. Acceptance isn't pretending that broken things aren't broken. It is refusing to believe brokenness exhausts their possibilities.

The sparrows still get their water.

And somehow they get several skies with it.

2.

fallen oak—
more places now
for mushrooms

 

Again, the first line appears to announce a loss.

A mature oak has fallen. From the human perspective—and perhaps even from the perspective of someone who loved that particular tree—something important has ended.

But ecosystems don't organize themselves around our preference for keeping things as they are.

The fallen tree becomes habitat. Fungi arrive. Insects arrive. Nutrients return to the soil. Death doesn't disappear from the poem, but neither does life wait politely for our mourning to conclude.

Prairie Zen doesn't offer the comforting cliché that everything happens for a reason.

It suggests something stranger and more observable:

everything that happens becomes part of what happens next.

3.

abandoned glove—
a field mouse
renting the thumb

 

This is the Prairie Zen economy.

Someone lost a glove. Its original purpose is over. To us it has become litter.

The mouse discovers available housing.

The humor matters because Prairie Zen isn't supposed to turn every encounter with nature into a solemn spiritual ceremony. Sometimes paying attention produces wisdom. Sometimes it produces a mouse living in somebody's glove.

The larger idea is still there: usefulness depends upon who's looking.

Human beings declared the glove useless.

The mouse filed different paperwork.

4.

soybean field—
the cellar hole
full of goldenrod

This is a particularly Midwestern kind of archaeology.

A cellar hole means there was once a house. Someone lived there. There were probably meals, arguments, winters, birthdays, repairs, bills, illnesses, mornings when somebody looked out the window and saw essentially the same land.

The house is gone.

Agriculture has absorbed the surrounding landscape, but the old foundation remains—and goldenrod has moved in.

Prairie Zen is deeply interested in places where different kinds of time overlap. Human history says: someone lived here.

The goldenrod says nothing.

It grows.

Neither cancels the other.

5.

field mowing—
the tractor
going around something

This may be the quietest poem of the five.

We aren't told what the tractor avoids.

A nest? A stone? Wildflowers? A fawn? A wet patch? Something the farmer remembers? Something we're not capable of guessing?

The absence of an explanation is the point.

For a moment, efficiency yields.

The straight line bends around something.

Prairie Zen lives in that bend.

It doesn't demand that human beings disappear from the landscape. The tractor belongs here too. So does agriculture. So does work. The interesting moment occurs when the person operating the machine recognizes that something else has a claim on the field.

We never learn what that something is.

We only see the accommodation.

Going Around Something

That final image may provide a useful way of understanding Prairie Zen itself.

We spend enormous portions of our lives trying to make the world travel in straight lines. We plan. Categorize. Improve. Remove obstacles. Repair cracks. Replace broken objects. Clear fields. Fill holes. Decide which things are useful and which things should be thrown away.

And the world keeps refusing to cooperate.

Oak trees fall.

Gloves disappear.

Houses vanish.

Birdbaths crack.

Something is in the field.

Prairie Zen isn't resignation. It isn't passivity, and it isn't an instruction to stop caring about what happens.

It's an acknowledgment that we are participants in a world containing innumerable other participants, most of whom have never heard our plans.

Sometimes wisdom is fixing what is broken.

Sometimes it's recognizing that the sparrows are already drinking from it.

And sometimes it's simply going around something.

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Rejected Titles and Other Things I Learned While Walking

Every book begins with a bad title.

Some books begin with twenty.

Mine usually begin with something that sounds profound until I have to imagine saying it out loud to another human being.

"What's your new book called?"

"Instructions for Becoming Moss."

"...Oh."

So, in the interest of public accountability, here are a few titles that have been rejected before they could embarrass either of us.

• How to Misplace a Soul in Northern Illinois
• Instructions for Becoming Moss
• The Prairie Doesn't Care
• Everything Eventually Becomes Dirt
• A Surprisingly Large Number of Crows
• Please Do Not Disturb the Ghosts
• The Department of Unimportant Discoveries
• Midwest Existentialism for Beginners
• Things I Was Pretty Sure Meant Something
• Probably Just a Stick

Some of these may yet have their day. Others deserve to remain quietly buried.

Walking is good for this sort of thing. Bad titles have a way of falling off somewhere around mile two.

It also teaches me things that are almost entirely useless.

Today's lessons:

• Crows notice you long before you notice them.
• Every cracked sidewalk eventually decides it would rather be a garden.
• The best mushrooms always seem to appear where no one was looking yesterday.
• If you stand still long enough, birds stop treating you like a problem.
• There is no such thing as "just another weed" if you spend enough time looking at it.
• You don't have to solve a day to have lived it well.

None of these observations have made me richer.

None have advanced my career.

None would impress a venture capitalist.

But they have made ordinary Tuesday mornings unexpectedly interesting, and that feels like a fair trade.

Besides, if Probably Just a Stick ever becomes the title of a book, you'll know exactly where it came from.

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The Prairie Zen School of Haiku of Thomas L. Vaultonburg

 The Prairie Zen School of Haiku

People often imagine Zen arriving from somewhere else. A mountain monastery. A bamboo grove. A stone garden where every pebble has been raked into perfect order. We inherit those images so completely that we forget the practice itself has never belonged to a landscape. It belongs to attention.

For more than thirty years I have been writing from a different landscape.

Not because I set out to invent anything new, but because I never had another place to stand.

My teachers have been red-winged blackbirds balancing on roadside cattails. Wind passing through abandoned farm fields. Hall Creek after spring rain. Snow drifting across forgotten county roads. Oaks that have watched generations of people arrive believing they were important and leave proving otherwise.

The prairie has always been enough.

Long before I ever thought of using the words Prairie Zen, the work had already begun. My earliest poems searched for moments that escaped notice. Later, my haiku abandoned explanation almost entirely. Instead of telling readers what to think, I learned to trust what remained after language became quiet.

A dead leaf blowing into my mouth while trying to speak the truth.

An old dog faithfully guarding nothing.

A bare tree still capable of holding the sky.

These are not symbols to decode. They are complete experiences. The prairie has no interest in becoming metaphor simply because a writer arrived carrying one.

That understanding did not come from philosophy alone. It came from years of walking. Through Rockford parks and railroad margins. Along river trails. Through restored prairie and oak savanna. Through Severson Dells, where glaciers, dolomite, Hall Creek, birds, fungi, prairie grass and deep geological time quietly refuse to separate themselves into subjects. They exist together because the world exists together.

The prairie teaches scale.

Stand in tall grass and you discover you are neither insignificant nor central. You are simply present.

That may be the most difficult lesson modern life offers.

Our culture rewards performance. The prairie rewards observation. Our devices demand reaction. The prairie asks only that you notice. Every season strips away another unnecessary layer until attention itself becomes enough.

I have watched this happen in my own work. Books like Small Songs for Weary Travelers and Vanished Roads were never attempts to imitate Japanese aesthetics. They were attempts to discover what contemplation sounds like when spoken with a Midwestern accent. They belong to gravel roads instead of temple paths, grain elevators instead of pagodas, meadowlarks instead of cranes.

That does not make them less Zen.

It makes them honestly rooted.

Prairie Zen is not a school. It has no robes, no membership, no doctrine waiting to be defended. It is simply the realization that awakening is no less available beside a rusted fencepost than beneath a cherry tree.

The prairie does not ask us to become someone else before it reveals itself.

It only asks us to look.

For decades, that has been the work.

Everything else has merely been writing it down.

Illustration from Vanished Roads by Tré

See the Prairie Zen of Thomas L. Vaultonburg in his latest book of haiku Vanished Roads

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Magedah Shabo Reviews Vanished Roads by Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Buy Vanished Roads

I recently had the pleasure of reading a review copy of Vanished Roads, a newly released haiku collection by Thomas L. Vaultonburg from Zombie Logic Press.

Having already encountered many of the haiku individually, I was fascinated by the interpretive depth and thematic unity that could emerge from rereading them as a body of work.

In Vanished Roads, loss and grief are less like endings and more like thresholds to discovery. In the poems' world, boundaries between the ordinary and the numinous, the human and the more-than-human world are never cleanly drawn.

This porosity is evident in many of the author's most memorable haiku turns, which tend to shift the reader's perspective in ways that feel dreamlike, yet natural and inevitable.

after she paints 
even the brush water

holds a sky

Tré's cover art gently brings the collection's themes into focus, sharing the poems' delight in multiple ways of seeing.

Reading Vanished Roads has left me with the sense that there is still more to discover and say "yes" to, both in haiku and in the world around us.

-Magedah Shabo

Read Sean Wright's review of Vanished roads at Zombie Logic Review

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Vanished Roads Thomas L. Vaultonburg

 In late 2019, my life became much smaller.

A ten-year relationship ended. I lost a home, daily contact with children I loved, longtime friendships, and a place within an arts community that had shaped much of my adult life. The future I had imagined for myself suddenly no longer existed. Before I could begin rebuilding, the world itself contracted. The COVID-19 pandemic closed doors for everyone, including many of the paths I might have taken to reconnect with the people, places, and opportunities I felt I had lost.

Then, in 2020, I suffered a stroke.

Looking back, it seems almost inevitable that I would find my way to haiku.

At a time when everything around me appeared to be shrinking, I was drawn to a literary form built on economy, attention, and presence. I began studying Buddhism and, more specifically, Soto Zen. What started as curiosity gradually became practice. I found myself less interested in explaining the world and more interested in experiencing it directly. Haiku offered a way to do that.

My earliest attempts were often little more than narrative poems wearing haiku clothing. I brought with me the habits I had developed over decades of writing lyric and narrative poetry. I wanted to tell stories, explain emotions, and make sure readers understood what I meant. Over time, however, the poems began teaching me something different. Instead of using haiku to express myself, I became interested in disappearing into the moment itself.

The result was not merely a change in writing style. It was a change in how I moved through the world.

Vanished Roads chronicles that journey.

The collection begins in grief and disorientation. It acknowledges loss—the loss of loved ones, relationships, identities, expectations, and familiar ways of living. Yet it is not a book about remaining lost. It is a book about what happens when the old maps stop working.

During this period, I reconnected with one of my oldest friends, Tré. Together we began a creative partnership that opened new possibilities in both art and life. In many ways, her presence marks the turning point of the collection. A door opens. A path appears where none seemed possible before.

As the book progresses, the poems become less concerned with the self and more concerned with the world beyond it. Roads disappear. Rivers, mountains, forests, weather, and animals take their place as teachers. The journey becomes less about recovering what was lost and more about learning how to walk forward without needing to recover it.

The title poem contains the image that best captures the spirit of the collection: a traveler asks for directions and is handed a map of vanished roads. That is the predicament many of us eventually face. The paths that once defined us disappear. The question then becomes whether we can continue the journey anyway.

These haiku are my attempt to answer yes.

Vanished Roads June 21st From Wolf Twin Books

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Flesh Wounds by Thomas L. Vaultonburg | Zombie Logic Press

 Flesh Wounds may be Thomas L. Vaultonburg's most autobiographical collection. Written between 1997 and 2004, the poems emerge directly from the years following his mother's death, a period spent working behind bars, in restaurants, strip clubs, country clubs, sports bars, warehouses, and eventually in a tavern he owned with his brother.

Unlike many collections that spend years being revised and refined, Flesh Wounds feels immediate. These poems were not excavated from decades of notebooks and polished into literary artifacts. They were written close to the experiences that inspired them, preserving their rough edges, contradictions, and emotional honesty.

The collection takes its title seriously. The wounds described here are rarely fatal. Instead, they are the daily injuries of ordinary life: failed relationships, dead-end jobs, bad judgment, loneliness, humiliation, lust, disappointment, and self-inflicted damage. Yet the poems refuse tragedy in its conventional form. Again and again, humor appears where despair ought to be. The speaker is frequently reckless, often cynical, occasionally self-destructive, but almost never self-pitying.

Bukowski's influence is evident, particularly in the attention paid to working-class life, bars, sex, and failure. Yet Flesh Wounds is ultimately less interested in romanticizing excess than documenting it. The bartenders, waitresses, drunks, lovers, managers, hustlers, and dreamers who populate these pages are not literary archetypes. They are people observed at close range during long nights spent serving drinks and watching human beings unravel.

What distinguishes the collection is its dual perspective. The narrator is both participant and witness. He is drinking with the crowd while simultaneously taking notes on it. He is implicated in the chaos he describes, but also detached enough to recognize its absurdity. The result is a voice that can be savage one moment and unexpectedly tender the next.

Viewed alongside later books such as Submerged Structure, Flesh Wounds captures an earlier version of the author: angrier, less guarded, more reckless, and more willing to place himself directly at the center of the story. If Submerged Structure often observes the world from a distance, Flesh Wounds lives inside the collision.

The lasting achievement of the collection is its refusal to separate beauty from damage. The poems recognize that some of the funniest stories, strongest attachments, and most revealing moments emerge from periods of profound disorder. Flesh Wounds is not a celebration of self-destruction, nor is it a warning against it. It is a record of survival written by someone who spent years standing close enough to the fire to know exactly how hot it was.

Buy Flesh Wounds By Thomas L. Vaultonburg At Zombie Logic Press

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Epstein Files: Rockford Edition

Every city has people who know where the bodies are buried.

In Rockford, some of them still answer the phone.

Necromancers Don’t Read Toe Tags follows drifters, addicts, exhausted cops, occult obsessives, failed artists, predators, survivors, and the few decent people left trying to navigate a city built on favors and selective memory.

A woman disappears.
A network closes ranks.
The wrong people start asking questions.
And somewhere beneath the bars, dead-end apartments, river fog, and old brick buildings, something ancient begins keeping score.

Nobody in this story is clean.
Some are just trying harder than others.

Necromancers Don’t Read Toe Tags is part crime novel, part fever dream, part ghost story about what happens when a town mistakes silence for peace.

The dead don’t stay quiet forever.

Get Necromancers Don't Read Toe Tags 

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