Vanished Roads: Making a Haiku Collection Tell a Story

One thing that mattered to us from the beginning with Vanished Roads was that it become a whole book, not simply a stack of haiku that happened to have the same author's name on them.

                    

That distinction might seem small, especially with haiku. A haiku is designed to survive on its own. It has its own little weather system, its own moment, its own beginning and ending. You can open a collection almost anywhere, read one poem, close the book, and theoretically you have experienced something complete. There is nothing wrong with making a collection that way. But that wasn't what I wanted Vanished Roads to be.

The poems had accumulated over a long and difficult period of my life, and when I began looking at them together I realized they weren't actually separate. Certain things kept returning: abandoned places, animals, roads, weather, objects people had discarded, small signs of persistence, and moments when the natural world seemed to be quietly reclaiming whatever human beings had left behind. More importantly, the emotional atmosphere of the poems changed. There was movement in them.

Once I saw that, sequencing became part of the writing.

The book begins in a darker and more enclosed place and gradually moves outward. It doesn't suddenly announce that everything is better. I wouldn't have believed a book that did that, and I certainly couldn't have written one. Instead, little openings begin appearing. The world becomes visible again. Animals arrive. Light changes. Humor returns. The landscape starts becoming something other than a backdrop for loss.

That same movement became important visually.

Tré's cover for Vanished Roads isn't simply packaging placed around the poems after the fact. The enormous tree, the narrow passage through it, the distant light and the road continuing beyond it all belong to the same journey the poems are making. Her illustrations throughout the book work the same way. We wanted the visual and poetic elements to feel as though they had grown from the same landscape.

That's why Michael Dylan Welch's description of Vanished Roads as a “well-designed haiku collection” pleased me so much. He also described the experience of reading it as one of “enjoyable patience.” Both observations get at something we were consciously trying to accomplish. The book isn't asking the reader to race toward a conclusion. Its changes happen incrementally, poem by poem, image by image.

Maybe that's appropriate for haiku. Emergence doesn't require a trumpet blast.

Sometimes it's just the next thing you notice.

Vanished Roads by Thomas L. Vaultonburg, with cover and illustrations by Tré, was published by Wolf Twin Books in 2026.

Vanished Roads at Wolf Twin Books

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The Most Dada Art Exhibit Ever: The Time I Wrote About Dog Shit on the Walls of the Rockford Art Museum

In 2017 I spent two days writing children's poems by hand on the walls of the Rockford Art Museum. All twenty-six of them.

I had a large box of expensive art markers supplied by the museum, and I tried to choose a color for each poem that worked visually with the illustration beside it. Sometimes this involved careful consideration of color, balance, and the relationship between text and image. Sometimes the decision was easier. “D is for Dog Poop” was written in brown. “U is for Urination” was written in yellow.

Nobody threw me out. I had permission.

In fact, this was part of Bittersweet Observations, a perfectly legitimate exhibition at a respected American art museum. There were framed illustrations by Jenny Mathews, other artists exhibiting serious work, museum staff, visitors, children, programming, a curator, and all the usual machinery of an actual museum exhibition. And right in the middle of it was a grown man writing about dog shit on the wall in brown marker.

I thought it was one of the great Dada art moments of all time. I still do.

The Dadaists Had It Easier

The Dadaists announced they were doing Dada. That's cheating.

If you walk into an exhibition that announces itself as Dada, you are prepared for Dada. Someone can put a urinal in the gallery and everyone strokes their chin because Marcel Duchamp has already explained the rules. I had a better opportunity. I could sneak Dada into a straight art exhibition. For kids.

I didn't set out to mock the museum or the people involved. I genuinely admired the Dada and Surrealist traditions, and I realized there was an opportunity here to combine two things that, as far as I knew, had not often been combined: children's literature and Dada.

The idea of writing the poems directly onto the museum walls was mine from beginning to end. I realized that if I could get them to say yes, the gates were open. They said yes. I'm not entirely convinced they thought through the implications.

I had.

The Monster Dictionary

The story actually began almost forty years earlier at Mary Morgan Grade School in Byron, Illinois, where in fifth grade we were assigned to write and illustrate a children's book. One might assume that a future poet and publisher would have attacked this assignment with enthusiasm. One would be wrong.

I procrastinated until two days before the deadline. At that point, having few interests that didn't involve baseball or monster movies, I decided an alphabet book would be the easiest possible solution. Twenty-six letters. Fill in the blanks. Draw some pictures. Turn it in. I called it The Monster Dictionary.

My teacher gave me a B and wrote:

“Not colored. Excellent ideas! if you would have put more effort into this project; the school could have sent this idea on to the Library of Congress.”

 

I found someone to color it. 

I later preserved her questionable semicolon for historical authenticity.

That note bothered me for decades. Not enough to become industrious, necessarily, but enough that the unfinished business remained.

Around age forty I was the general manager of Castaways, a dive bar underneath a bridge on the Rock River in Rockford. Among the people I met there was Jenny Mathews, one of the early members of the Rockford Rage Roller Derby. I asked Jenny if she'd be interested in illustrating a children's alphabet book about all the things kids hate. The working title was Atrocities From A to Z.

She said yes. I sent her the first poem, and she sent back an illustration. It was perfect.

Then she moved to Texas. We made another children's book long-distance while Atrocities went onto the back burner. Jenny eventually came back from Texas, we became a couple, and a scant eight years later the book was finished.

By then it was called Atrocious Poems A to Z. The finished book was written by me, illustrated by Jenny Mathews, published by Zombie Logic Press, and printed in Michigan by Edwards Brothers Malloy. It was a real children's book, despite considerable evidence to the contrary.

Things Kids Love to Hate

The premise was simple: children experience atrocities every day. Adults don't recognize most of them as atrocities because we've forgotten what it feels like to be a child. Vegetables, haircuts, inoculations, bullies, sharing, liver, monsters, having siblings, stepping in dog poop, needing to pee at an inconvenient time. These things are ordinary to adults. To children they can temporarily assume the proportions of Greek tragedy.

That was the joke, but we took the premise seriously. The poems were intended to give children and adults a funny way into conversations about anxiety, bullying, sharing, fear, embarrassment, and the various indignities involved in being small and having larger people control much of your existence. I also worked lessons about poetry into the book: haiku, limerick, rhetorical questions, visual poetry, personification, oxymoron, portmanteau, and other literary forms and devices.

It was silly. It wasn't unserious. That distinction matters.

Twenty-Six Poems and One Very Cold Museum

Installing the exhibition was considerably less whimsical than looking at the finished wall might suggest. It was around 100 degrees outside. Inside the museum it was cold. Museums have to maintain conditions suitable for preserving artwork, which does not necessarily mean conditions suitable for a middle-aged poet spending two days handwriting an entire book vertically on a wall.

I had badly underestimated how long it would take. All twenty-six poems had to be written by hand beside Jenny's illustrations. My hands and arms became exhausted. I did yoga on the museum floor to keep myself loose enough to continue.

Meanwhile, people were working around me because the total installation involved creating a small forest inside the museum. I would periodically stop writing and help with other parts of the installation, partly because they needed help and partly because my body needed a break from writing on the wall.

I knew the exhibition would remain up for approximately three months. Potentially tens of thousands of people were going to walk past these words, which adds a certain pressure to penmanship. But living with a visual artist had taught me one of the great truths of art: anything can be painted over.

I believe I did make a mistake somewhere and part of the wall had to be repainted so I could do it again. I no longer remember which letter or what I screwed up. Nothing is permanent. Especially in a museum.

Brown

The museum held art classes, so there was an impressive assortment of markers available. I didn't simply alternate colors mechanically. I tried to look at Jenny's illustration, consider the neighboring pieces, stand back from the wall, and choose something that made the installation work visually as a whole.

Some choices were intuitive. Some were literal. “O is for Orange” presented few conceptual difficulties. Neither did Dog Poop. Brown. Urination? Yellow.

There was no manifesto explaining this. No wall text announced that the use of brown interrogated bourgeois assumptions regarding canine waste. I picked brown because dog poop is brown. I picked yellow because pee is yellow. Then I continued working.

This, to me, is the crucial difference between what happened at Bittersweet Observations and a deliberately advertised Dada exhibition.

Nobody had been warned.

The Kids Got It

The children seemed to understand the work immediately. Of course they did. They didn't require anyone to explain the premise that stepping in dog poop could constitute a catastrophe. They were still close enough to childhood for the scale of these events to make intuitive sense.

Some older visitors seemed to need permission. You could almost see the process occurring: Am I supposed to take this seriously? Is this allowed in an art museum?

Yes and no. That was part of the fun.

These were trivial things and these were enormous things. Both propositions could be true at the same time. Children already knew that.

Atrocious Poems A To Z by Vaultonburg and Matthews from Zombie Logic Press

Please Don't List Me

There is another strange part of the story. I asked not to be listed as one of the exhibiting artists.

This wasn't a conceptual gesture. I wasn't making some grand statement about authorship or institutional recognition. I was tired. At that point Jenny and I seemed to be doing three, four, sometimes five public events a week. We were in shows constantly. We were everywhere. I had reached the limit of how much public exposure I wanted. I couldn't find enough corners to hide in.

By the time Bittersweet Observations came around, I wanted to do the work and be left out of the rest. So I asked to be left off the artist listing.

In retrospect, this was a mistake. How many times in your life does a respected American museum invite you to write juvenile thoughts directly onto its walls?

My bad.

The absurdity becomes more apparent in photographs from the exhibition. There I am standing beneath an enormous version of my name mounted over the installation. So I managed the nearly impossible feat of having my name displayed prominently across an entire museum wall while simultaneously not being officially listed as one of the artists.

A photo of Thomas L. Vaultonburg (duh)me in front of the wall with my 26 handwritten poems at the Bittersweet Observations Show at Rockford Art Museum 2017. Photo by Ryan Davis. 

Dada could hardly have improved upon this.

I Thought I'd Gotten Away With Something

When I finished the installation, I knew exactly what I thought I'd accomplished. I thought I'd gotten one over on them.

Nearly forty years earlier, my fifth-grade teacher had looked at The Monster Dictionary and told me that if I'd put more effort into it, the school might have sent the idea to the Library of Congress. Now I had taken the descendant of that lazy fifth-grade alphabet book and written the whole thing on the walls of a respected American museum.

I thought that was magnificent. I still think it's pretty good.

But at 57, I see something else. I was so interested in completing my private argument that I didn't fully recognize the public opportunity I'd been given. That was a recurring problem for me. I wasn't failing to make things. I was making things constantly: books, poems, publishing projects, collaborations, blogs, fictional leagues, and private worlds.

What I often neglected was making sure there would be a durable public record that I had made them. I had confused being seen with seeking attention.

They're not the same thing.

Not Colored

There is one detail from my fifth-grade teacher's note that seems considerably funnier now than it did in 1979.

“Not colored.”

That was one of her complaints.

Nearly forty years later I stood inside the Rockford Art Museum with a box full of expensive colored art markers and spent two days correcting the deficiency. I colored it. Dog poop was brown. Urination was yellow. The other twenty-four required varying degrees of aesthetic judgment.

Eventually Bittersweet Observations ended. The exhibition came down. I'm sure the museum was delighted to paint over my poems. Another exhibition went up. I believe it involved motorcycles. I wasn't bothered. I've never had many illusions about permanence in my work. Museums change exhibitions. Walls get painted. One thing disappears so another can occupy the space.

Of course I went to the next show. I was required to be everywhere.

What survives now are photographs, the book, old blog posts, museum records, and memories. One of my contemporary posts about Atrocious Poems A to Z spends considerable time telling the story of my fifth-grade teacher, Jenny, the eight years we worked on the book, the Library of Congress, and the purpose of the poems.

Then, at the very end, I added an update:

“Oh, here's the part I forgot to say: my book ended up on the walls of a major American museum.”

I forgot to mention the museum.

That tells you almost everything you need to know about me at the time.

The Most Dada Art Exhibit Ever

So here is the part I don't intend to forget this time.

In 2017, as part of Bittersweet Observations at the Rockford Art Museum, I spent two days handwriting all twenty-six poems from Atrocious Poems A to Z directly onto the museum walls beside illustrations by Jenny Mathews. It hurt. I did yoga on the museum floor. I made at least one mistake and had to do part of it over. Children understood what we were doing better than some adults did.

I wrote a poem about dog shit in brown marker and a poem about urination in yellow marker. My enormous name appeared above the installation, spelled incorrectly, while I had specifically requested that I not be listed as an exhibiting artist.

I thought I had successfully smuggled Dada into a respectable museum disguised as children's literature.

Maybe I had.

But here's the part my fifth-grade teacher would appreciate. She told me the problem with my first book was that I hadn't put enough effort into it. She told me it wasn't colored.

Nearly forty years later, I spent two exhausting days writing the whole damn thing again on the walls of an American art museum.

In color.

There, Mrs. Liggett. I finished it.

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Tea With the Tigress: Ten Years Inside the Strange Machinery of a Life

I don't think Tea With the Tigress is primarily a book of love poems, although love is everywhere in it.

I don't think it's primarily a book about sex, although there is plenty of that too.

And despite the number of poems involving death, loneliness, aging, memory, physical vulnerability, poetry, absurdity, wolves, celestial bodies, Richard Brautigan, used clothing, zombies, alcohol, buses and people behaving badly, it isn't really a book about any of those things either.

I think Tea With the Tigress is a book about being returned to the world.

That is much easier for me to see now than it was when the book appeared in 2023.

The subtitle is Poems 2010–2020, which makes the collection something of an accidental autobiography. The poems weren't written to document a decade. They accumulated while a decade was happening. When gathered together, however, they preserve something a deliberately written memoir probably couldn't: the strange proportions by which a life is actually experienced.

Huge things sometimes occupy three lines.

A ridiculous thing can occupy a page.

Sex becomes astrophysics. A trip becomes a joke. A flower becomes an existential event. The human heart becomes machinery. An answering machine becomes an excuse to make jokes about dead composers.

And somehow all of it belongs together.

The opening poem, "Tigress," contains the proposition upon which much of the book operates:

when a wise man meets
Tigress in the jungle, he
says, thank you, my love

It is funny, but it isn't merely funny. The tiger isn't defeated. The tiger isn't domesticated. The supposedly wise man recognizes what has arrived and gives thanks for it.

That's a pretty good introduction to the next eighty pages.

The World Comes Back

Reading the old Zombie Logic Blog alongside these poems makes the decade feel much less abstract.

There I am watching horror movies at ridiculous hours. Collecting Monster Club artifacts. Playing old computer RPGs. Writing about Hot Wheels, Queen albums, Hamm's beer signs, pennies, fantasy football, poetry feuds, Richard Brautigan, bad jokes and things I found on my hard drive. I invent Dr. Millard Rausch's post-zombie-apocalypse biography. I create imaginary Outsider Poetry organizations. I remember motel rooms. I make jokes about Presidential Physical Fitness Awards.

And I keep writing poems.

It would be easy to dismiss all of that as clutter. I don't anymore.

It's the material of the life.

One of the smallest poems in Tea With the Tigress is "Avocation":

since you never
had time
to behold
this particular
downspout
I went ahead
and did it
for you.

That little poem may explain a surprisingly large portion of my work.

Someone has to look at the downspout.

Someone has to remember the forgotten movie, the weird sign, the motel, the bus station, the ridiculous conversation, the object nobody else thought worth saving. Someone has to look at all the supposedly insignificant things while everyone else is busy looking at the significant ones.

That was what Zombie Logic Blog was doing during these years, too.

And apparently so was I.

Jenny Enters the Poems

But there is another enormous presence in Tea With the Tigress: Jenny.

Not simply Jenny as subject, but Jenny as an alternative way of encountering the world.

One of my favorite examples now is "May." The speaker is in his laboratory "pissing away April" while she is in her studio preparing the colors of the coming month. He wants to interrupt her but fears that doing so will cause "Garbageman Green / Peonies" and "Poopsicle Lilies" to erupt from him.

Having recently revisited the old Zombie Logic posts, that poem suddenly looks almost documentary.

Again and again in those entries, I wander into a room and Jenny has made something.

Sometimes I understand it.

Sometimes I don't.

Sometimes it takes me four paintings to figure out what she's doing.

The domestic world of these poems isn't presented as retreat from the larger world. It is where the larger world keeps appearing. Tea, paintings, dresses, desks, flowers, food, bodies and jokes continually open trapdoors into something enormous.

"Waiting" may be the clearest early statement of it. Love is compared first to an apple harvested too early, then startlingly to a heart awaiting a surgeon's scalpel, and finally to tea being prepared for afternoons of conversation at a shared desk. The poem ends with two people occupying the same room separately, waiting for their love "to steep."

That double desk may be one of the most important locations in the book.

Not Paris.

Not Greenwich Village.

Not some mythical poet's garret.

A double desk.

Two people making things.

The Body Becomes Strange

The body in Tea With the Tigress is never entirely dependable.

Sometimes it is erotic. Sometimes comic. Sometimes cosmic. Sometimes it is essentially a machine whose warranty has become questionable.

In "What Makes Me Tick," the speaker's mechanical aortic valve becomes something simultaneously industrial and alive:

My St. Jude 27 vavgj-515
Mechanical aortic valve
Thuds like a war bird's wings
In a hummingbird feeder.

That's one of the central transformations of the collection.

The machinery doesn't destroy the poetry.

It becomes poetry.

Later, in "Changing Lanes On an Empty Highway At 3:22 A.M.," the speaker takes inventory of medications, operations, age and diminishing speed, then cautiously moves into the passing lane anyway. He knows something "younger, faster, / More capable" will eventually overtake him.

But for a moment he accelerates.

That strikes me now as one of the key poems in the collection.

There is no grand declaration of triumph.

The car changes lanes.

That's enough.

And Then There Is Sex

There is a lot of sex in this book.

Some of it is tender. Some is ridiculous. Some becomes astronomy, geography, classical music, wine criticism or military history because apparently simply describing sex would have been too straightforward.

"The Yellow River" turns a drunken navigational error in bed into a disastrous military incursion and concludes, perfectly, "War is hell."

"Sunday" sets up an elaborate sexual encounter before revealing in its final joke that the activity under discussion is apparently doing the taxes.

"Astrophysics" calculates a kiss along the Y axis of a shoulder as though intimacy were celestial navigation.

This is important because the erotic poems aren't really interruptions of the more serious material.

They are the same material.

The body that can break is also the body that desires.

The body that ages still reaches for another body.

The body that contains machinery still wants to dance.

Mortality doesn't negate appetite in this book. Mortality makes appetite urgent.

The Poet as Fool

There is also an argument about poetry running through Tea With the Tigress, and the poet generally loses it.

Good.

"The Old Hermit Speaks of Poetry" imagines poems escaping like ducks from a broken pen. Instead of chasing them, the old poet drinks his wine and wanders into the hills, only to discover that the poems have been waiting there all along—in rocks, trees and a brook laughing at the fool searching for them.

"Discourses In Poetics" takes the solemn master-and-acolyte tradition and slowly dismantles it until the Master is apparently attempting to access someone's bank account.

That's closer to my conception of poetry than any manifesto I could write.

Poetry matters tremendously.

Poets should therefore probably not be trusted with it.

The dedication page establishes the governing philosophy before the collection properly begins, quoting my middle-school principal Joe Parks: "Mr. Vaultonburg, you amuse only yourself."

Forty years later, that seems less like criticism than permission.

The Old World Is Still There

The book isn't entirely domestic renewal and comic eroticism.

Older ghosts keep wandering through it.

"Playing the Short Stack," which we've just encountered again while rehabilitating the Zombie Logic archive, reduces an entire losing position to a poker table where the speaker can't formulate a comeback because he can't even see his opponent behind her mountain of chips.

"Pockets" imagines wearing a dead stranger's Salvation Army suit while typing poems on a Smith Corona and occasionally checking the pockets to see whether the previous owner left instructions.

"Beaten" needs four lines:

Every face
At the bus station
Is a torn
Lottery ticket.

Those poems come from the same imaginative territory as the older Zombie Logic material we've been excavating: buses, bars, thrift stores, motel rooms, people who have lost, people who are still playing anyway.

But something has changed.

The speaker isn't quite as trapped inside that world anymore.

He can look back at it.

From Tigress to Wolves

The final portion of the collection begins to sound noticeably different.

The poems become quieter.

More elemental.

Wolves appear. Trees appear. The moon appears. Solitude stops being merely isolation and starts becoming a landscape.

"Unravel" may be the hinge:

as i unravel
I become miles of new thread
to weave with again

That poem now sounds almost prophetic.

By the time we reach "Lilacs," the heart is described as a bomb shelter emerging from an "endless / Winter of discontent." The speaker remains wary of love, but the window is open.

And then comes "Full Wolf Moon 2020":

full wolf moon bays down
on grey, oily streets howling
for its lost lover

Read from the vantage point of 2026, it is difficult not to hear the poet who would eventually write Small Songs for Weary Travelers beginning to emerge.

The attention is changing.

The jokes aren't gone. The weirdness isn't gone. The city isn't gone.

But the poems have started looking outward.

Tea With the Tigress

That's why I think the title is better than I previously understood.

The Tigress isn't simply a woman.

She isn't merely love or sexuality either.

The Tigress is life when it becomes dangerous enough to be worth approaching again.

The wise man doesn't conquer her.

He doesn't explain her.

He meets her.

And says thank you.

Across Tea With the Tigress, the speaker repeatedly does exactly that. He says thank you to love, sex, absurdity, art, jokes, bodies, mechanical parts, memories, old clothes, bad decisions, flowers, wolves, buses, darkness and another day in which something strange might still happen.

The book ends near grief, but it doesn't end in defeat. "End Punctuation" imagines two people leaning into one another like parentheses around the story of their love.

That's an extraordinarily appropriate image for the collection.

Because Tea With the Tigress is itself a set of parentheses.

2010–2020.

Ten years enclosed between them.

Inside are several lives, a tremendous amount of nonsense, some darkness, quite a bit of sex, a mechanical heart, a double desk, a woman making paintings in the next room, wolves gathering at the edges, and a poet gradually discovering that surviving the world and paying attention to it may actually be the same activity.

The copyright page credits Jenny Mathews with the cover and illustrations for "Halloween 1974" and "The Perfect Crime," while Tré created the remaining artwork and provided design and editing help. That makes the physical book itself strangely appropriate: other people helped surround these poems with images and give the decade a shape.

And perhaps that's what I see most clearly now, after going back through the old blog.

I thought I was wasting an astonishing amount of time.

Watching movies. Writing jokes. Collecting things. Looking out windows. Making blogs nobody seemed to read. Falling in love. Getting older. Writing poems about downspouts.

Turns out I was living.

And fortunately, I wrote some of it down.

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Vanished Roads By Thomas L. Vaultonburg Definitive Bibliography

 

Vanished Roads: The Haiku of Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Vanished Roads is a collection of 104 haiku and short poems by Thomas L. Vaultonburg, published in 2026 by Wolf Twin Books, with cover and interior illustrations by Tré.

Written across several years, the poems move through woods, prairies, abandoned roads, small towns, grief, solitude, humor, aging, memory, and renewal. Animals wander freely through the collection—coyotes, deer, bees, wasps, dragonflies, and snakes—but the landscape of Vanished Roads is as much interior as physical. The natural world continually intersects with human experience until the distinction between the two begins to disappear.

Loss is present throughout the book, but Vanished Roads is ultimately less interested in mourning what has disappeared than in discovering what remains. A bee trapped against a window, wind passing through bamboo, an empty chapel, snow covering a trail, or a bucket reflecting the night sky can become an occasion for revelation.

The poems range from traditional haiku to senryu and extremely compressed lyric poetry. Some contain seventeen syllables. Some contain only four words. Rather than treating haiku as a rigid syllabic exercise, Vanished Roads approaches it as a way of paying attention: reducing a moment until only the essential image, movement, humor, or emotional residue remains.

Each poem occupies its own page, giving even the smallest poem room to breathe. Tré's sparse black-and-white illustrations appear throughout the book, extending the quiet, strange, and sometimes playful world of the poems without overwhelming them.

Since its publication, Vanished Roads has received five reviews and responses remarkable not only for their enthusiasm, but for the different aspects of the collection each reader discovered.

What Reviewers Have Said About Vanished Roads

Conrad Sienkiewicz

“What Vaultonburg can do with merely four words is impressive and enviable!”

“Vaultonburg's best efforts can comfortably rest alongside those of other haiku masters, such as Basho and Issa.”

Magedah Shabo

“In Vanished Roads, loss and grief are less like endings and more like thresholds to discovery.”

“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.”

Mark Tate

“Vaultonburg has masterful touch as well, readers will admire his succinct whisperings.”

“He not only sees, he inhabits the object along his journey.”

Melanie Medved

“This is truly some of the most recent memorable poetry I’ve experienced in years.”

“40 years and thousands of poems later, it’s hard to recapture the joy that I felt in that classroom of my first favorite poem, and yet, Thomas Vaultonburg has handed me that joy again with Vanished Roads.”

Sean Wright

“Vanished Roads is an immensely satisfying collection that rewards both casual reading and close study.”

“In an era when so much short-form poetry can feel interchangeable, Vanished Roads possesses something rarer: a coherent artistic personality.”

“Highly recommended.”

Selected Haiku from Vanished Roads

say yes
to the sunlight
when it finds you

cracked birdbath—
the sparrows drinking
from several skies

fallen oak—
more places now
for mushrooms

abandoned glove—
a field mouse
renting the thumb

bucket of stars—
someone left it
under the moon

About the Book

Vanished Roads contains 104 haiku and short poems by Thomas L. Vaultonburg, with cover and interior illustrations by Tré. Published by Wolf Twin Books in 2026, the collection explores nature, solitude, grief, humor, memory, and the unexpected ways the world continues after loss.

Title: Vanished Roads
Author: Thomas L. Vaultonburg
Illustrations: Tré
Publisher: Wolf Twin Books
Publication year: 2026
Format: Paperback
Price: $15

Vanished Roads is available directly from Wolf Twin Books.

Buy Vanished Roads from Wolf Twin Books

More information about Thomas L. Vaultonburg, his books, poetry, publications, and other work is available at his author website.

Library of Congress 

Goodreads

Google Books

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Say Yes To The Sunlight When It Finds You

Sometimes the sun just finds you. Sometimes you need go on a journey to get to the place where the sun finds you. Either way, say yes to the sunlight when it finds you. 

Say Yes to the Sunlight When It Finds You, acrylic painting by Thomas L. Vaultonburg, 2026. Based on an illustration by Tré from the haiku collection Vanished Roads.

My sunlight

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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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Necromancers Don't Read Toe Tags Chapter Ten

 Chapter Ten Necromancers Don't Read Toe Tags

The Man Everyone Needed to Believe In

They called him Mercy.

Not his real name, of course.

He had gone by other names before.

He had been other men before.

But when a man comes back from prison with language like recovery, like growth, like I’ve done the work, people who need hope will build altars out of him.

He didn’t ask them to.

He never had to.

People want to believe beautiful stories.

Mercy told beautiful stories.

He told them in bars, in rehab meetings, in soft-lit art spaces with exposed brick walls and community grants taped invisibly to the ceiling.

He talked about the dark places he’d been.
He talked about the demon bargain he almost made.
He talked about the ritual magic he used to chase love like power.
He talked about sex like it was a kind of prayer
and women like they were cathedral doors
that opened to let him get better.

He talked with the candor of a confessional
and the charm of a wolf who had learned to smile.

He was never ashamed in the right places.

That’s what made him convincing.

Shame would imply responsibility.

Mercy preferred redemption narratives that never required repair.

Communities built on kindness are the easiest to con.

That’s not cynicism.

That’s architecture.

People who believe in healing
want healing to be real so badly
that sometimes
they forget healing isn’t magic.

It’s debt.
It’s blood and work and humility.
It’s showing up to people who were hurt and saying:

“I did this.
I will listen.
I will not require you to love me afterward.”

Mercy skipped the hard verbs.

He moved in.

He was given keys.
He was given microphones.
He was given rooms full of people
who bent their heads softly toward him
when he spoke.

He even worked with women who’d been broken by men like him.

And the town applauded
like watching him speak healing words
was the same thing
as him never having been a knife.

Mort came because the numbers didn’t add up.

It wasn’t Mercy that lit the cosmic alarm.

It was the people around him.

Too many fogged souls.
Too many half-closed hearts.
Too many women whose stories tilted—
not invalidated,
not erased,
just gently, firmly redirected into forgiveness they didn’t choose.

The universe tolerates cruelty longer than it tolerates fraud.

Fraud breaks the rules of motion.

It tells suffering:

“Stop moving.
You don’t get to decide how this story ends.”

That’s when Mort gets called.

He found Mercy reading poetry in a hall someone else had paid for.

People cried.

People held hands.

Mercy described making a pact with darkness
like it was a romantic anecdote.

People laughed because it sounded like theater,
and because laughing forgives preemptively.

Mort watched.

Not Mercy.

The room.

He saw women smiling politely with their hands in their laps.

He saw a girl pretending not to shrink when Mercy walked past her row.

He saw love
doing the ugliest thing love can do:

protecting the wrong thing.

He didn’t stop the event.

He waited.

When Mercy left the building
to stand under the mural painted in his honor,
Mort joined him.

Mercy saw him and smiled like a man used to admiration.

“Brother,” he said warmly. “Are you here to hear the good news or share it?”

Mort didn’t answer.

He watched the mural:

Mercy painted like a saint.
Hands open.
Eyes upward.
Benevolent.

Paint forgives easier than people do.

Mort finally asked, quiet as winter:

“Who have you actually apologized to?”

Mercy grinned.

“I’ve apologized to the universe,” he said. “That counts for everyone.”

“No,” Mort said gently. “It doesn’t.”

Mercy’s smile tightened just a fraction.

“I’m doing good now,” he said. “I’m helping people. I’m proof healing is real.”

Mort nodded.

“You are proof that performing healing pays very well.”

Mercy’s eyes cooled.

“People need me,” he said simply.

Mort didn’t argue.

Predators always think they are necessary.

He found the woman later.

Not The Woman;
not the only one.

There’s never only one.

She didn’t tell him everything.

She didn’t have to.

She said she got messages she never asked for.
She said she was told to be flattered.
She said when she withdrew,
she was called ungrateful.
She said she was told he had suffered enough,
that she should “practice compassion.”

She said forgiveness didn’t feel like a gift.

It felt like pressure applied gently to her throat.

Mort listened.

He did not write anything down.

He didn’t ask her to forgive him.

He didn’t ask her for evidence.

He just let her tell the truth
and watched the air around her
move again.

Sometimes the kindest thing you can do for someone
is agree, silently,
that what hurt them
did.

The thing living around Mercy
wasn’t inside him.

That would have made this easier.

It hovered above him like a halo made of debt.
A shimmering thing made entirely of borrowed belief.

Power from applause.
Power from hope.
Power from people who wanted to heal so badly
they outsourced their courage to a man who spoke confidently about demons.

Mort had seen worse entities.

He had rarely seen a more popular one.

He stood beneath the halo
and spoke like a clerk tired of being polite.

“He doesn’t get to keep what doesn’t belong to him,” Mort said quietly.

The halo pulsed, confused.

Mort continued.

“The forgiveness he didn’t earn?
The absolution he never asked properly for?
The wholeness he convinced people they owed him?”

He looked at the sky.

“I need it back.”

Cosmic things rarely speak.

This one screamed.

Bright civility peeled back like paper soaked through with rain.

Everything Mercy had stolen without admitting to stealing
came loose.

Not to punish him.

Just to return balance.

Women felt anger again.
Men who adored him started to wonder why.
A mural that had looked holy
now just looked like a man.

Mercy staggered
like a drunk whose charisma had been poured out onto the floor.

He laughed weakly when the room no longer adored him by default.

“Why are you doing this?” he croaked.

Mort looked almost kind.

“Because forgiveness is not your right,” he said softly.
“It is not a currency.
You do not get to take it without being invited.”

Mercy snarled.

“You’re destroying the work I’ve done!”

Mort shook his head.

“I’m letting reality exist again.”

The town did not burst into righteous violence.

That would have been easy.

Instead,
something far more terrifying happened.

People had to think again.

Women decided what they actually felt.

Some left the room.
Some confronted him.
Some did neither.

Some forgave him—

and this time
it counted
because no one told them to.

Some never would.

He had to live with that.

Which meant he had to live with something real
for the first time in years.

Later,
Mort sat on a curb.

Someone walked by
and, out of reflex,
offered him coffee.

He held it.

He didn’t drink.

Janelle appeared beside him like gravity.

She already knew.

She watched the town adjusting to having feelings again.

“Did you break him?” she asked.

Mort shook his head.

“No,” he said. “I broke the shelter he hid in.”

She nodded slowly.

They sat in the new weather,
listening to a man realizing he wasn’t adored anymore
and women remembering that their boundaries were not cruelty.

Janelle finally exhaled.

“Forcing someone to forgive,” she said quietly,
“is a kind of assault.”

Mort nodded.

“Yes,” he said.

They didn’t feel triumphant.

They felt like they had torn gauze off a wound
that wasn’t done bleeding yet.

Sometimes that is justice.

Sometimes that is mercy.

Sometimes those are the same word,
and sometimes they never will be.

The town breathed.

And somewhere,
far off,
a tired universe
allowed a little more truth
back into circulation.

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