(songbirds)

.

.

.

.

.

songbirds
calling again for mates
all the years
I thought
I had forever

.

.

.

red lights, June 2011

.

.

.

April 4: Vietnam Era (Haibun)

Vietnam Era

Baby, baby, wash your hair in gravy!
Dry it out with bubble gum and send it to the navy.

We cling to the safety of a thick tree trunk, the three of us, four years old apiece, peering between the branches in satisfaction as our three-year-old victim cries in confusion. She isn’t even sure what we’re talking about—because, of course, what we’re talking about makes no sense—but she can tell we mean her harm. We mean her harm because she’s young and weak and we want to believe that we’re not. Because there are three of us and one of her. Because we have a sturdy tree to hide behind and she doesn’t. We are filled with blinding certainty and superiority until like lightning our tiny, white-haired, ferocious nursery-school teacher descends upon us, the wrath of God coming to punish us for our sins. “Go sit on the porch for the rest of recess!” she shouts. “How dare you make fun of someone like that, someone smaller than you! You should all be ashamed!” And just like that, we all are.

mute button
the last generation’s war
rages on the screen

 

 

________________________________________________

first published in Haibun Today 5:1, March 2011

April 2: Honey (Flashbacks to Moscow, 1990)

February
you bake me a sweet cake
in a sugarless country

.

skiing in Gorky Park—
suddenly realizing
where we’re going

.

March
a snowstorm
settles it

.

April
babushkas chiding us
for our warmth

.

May
blossoming
at last

.

_________________________________

Happy birthday, honey.

March 31: Skinny Dipping (Prompted)

skinny dipping
the man in the moon
as shy as I am

.

(NaHaiWriMo prompt for March 31st, per Alan Summers: Skin )

______________________________

So you all know there was this thing called NaHaiWriMo back in February, right? National Haiku Writing Month? Where the participants were supposed to write a haiku every day in the month of February? And about a zillion people did this, and wrote some fantastic haiku, and a lot of them got their inspiration by following prompts cooked up and posted on Facebook by Michael Dylan Welch, the First Vice-President of the Haiku Society of America and NaHaiWriMo founder?

And everyone had so much fun that they begged and whined until Michael appointed Alan Summers, who is a founding editor of haijinx and the proprietor of Area 17 and does a whole lot of other exciting things with haiku, to continue to provide haiku prompts on the NaHaiWriMo Facebook page for the month of March? And tons of people kept following along and having all kinds of fun and no one really wanted the fun to end?

Well, to my shock and delight, Michael decided to ask me to keep all these NaHaiWriMo groupies happy by providing prompts for the month of April (which happens to be National Poetry Month). So if you have a Facebook account, and you haven’t already “liked” the NaHaiWriMo page (see link above), go do that now, please, and then my prompts will start showing up in your news feed, and if you want you can even write haiku inspired by them (or haiku not inspired by them) and post them on the NaHaiWriMo page and be part of this whole wild movement.

If you don’t have and don’t want a Facebook account, fear not, I will also be posting the prompts here after I post them on Facebook, so you can follow along. If you want, you can post haiku inspired by the prompts on your own blog, if you have one. Or you can post them in my comments, and let me know if you’d like me to post them on Facebook for you. (Just be forewarned that if you post haiku here [or usually on Facebook for that matter], most journals will consider them previously published and therefore ineligible for further publication — haijinx being one notable exception, yay us.)

Now, it’s true that I have not actually been following most of the NaHaiWriMo prompts myself, in the sense of, you know, writing haiku about the topics given. (I’m ornery that way. Also really busy.) But I have been following the results of the NaHaiWriMo prompts, and I find them fascinating and wonderful. All kinds of people who might not ordinarily write haiku regularly have been doing so. They’ve been challenged to write about things they might not ordinarily think to write about. They’ve demonstrated the vast variety of haiku it’s possible to write on a single topic. They’ve developed a camaraderie, started to build a community.

So I am thrilled to have the honor of contributing to this amazing movement. (Also, any idea how much fun it is to brainstorm a long crazy list of haiku prompts? Really fun.)

Look for my prompt for April 1st to appear late tonight. (In seventeen or eighteen hours from the time I posted this, that is, for those of you who are so inconsiderate as to live in drastically different time zones from me.) See you then.

March 17: Autumn Wind (in Wet Cement)

This looks like it’s from a printed page because it is. It’s from Wet Cement, which is a lovely little conference anthology from the “Cradle of American Haiku” Haiku Society of America conference back in September. Mike Montreuil edited it, Aubrie Cox laid it out (check out her beloved Optima typeface) and Lidia Rozmus did some understated, beautiful artwork (in her usual style) for it. It was a delight to get it in the mail last week and be reminded of that wonderful weekend and so many of the wonderful poets I met.

The title comes from a haiku by Gayle Bull, the proprietress of Foundry Books, where part of the conference was held (and where I really need to get back to, soon, to check out the mind-blowing haiku section, because, ha ha, I don’t have enough to read). It is, fittingly, written in concrete on the ledge of a window in her shop. (Also in ink, on page 24 of the anthology.)

wet cement —
kids hide in the bushes
giggling

— Gayle Bull

March 8: This Is Not a Haiku

.

Forward

March: It’s not just about the wind.
Light from the sun reaches us
and keeps going.
Raindrops flow like glass on glass.
My son is tracing circuit diagrams
on the back of a page from Hamlet.
We all dream that way sometimes.

When you climb a mountain
it divides the day.
Spring at the bottom and
winter at the top.
I pick up the phone, put it down again.
It’s not the right season to go backward.
I wish some year I’d remember
to write down the date
I hear the first bird sing.

Once a red-tailed hawk
moved into our neighborhood
and surveyed the chipmunks for days
before deciding to move on.
Don’t tell me you’ve never been tempted
to stay too long.
I’m sure there’s a song about that.

The equinox is coming:
are you equal to it?
This is when we realize
that snow is water.
That ice is light.
That every day the sun reaches us
at a slightly different angle:
March.

.

________________

.

So I’m really busy this week. Really. Insanely. Busy. Right now I should be doing six other things. Going to bed being one of them. Every minute for the last week I should have been doing six other things. A lot of those minutes I spent writing poetry instead. I’m hopeless that way.

At one point I guess I decided that it wasn’t enough to jot down a haiku or two in my off minutes, I needed to write a longer poem instead, one that would require some concentrated effort and allow me to put off my much more boring tasks for as long as possible. So I wrote this.  Sorry.

.

March 7 (Today’s News)

.

wildflowers
today’s news the same
as yesterday’s

.

______________________

.

First published in The Heron’s Nest XIII:1, March 2011

.

.

February 22 (Winter Dream)

winter dream
you and the moon
disappear together

____________________

First posted at Haiku Bandit Society for the Feb. 2011 Moon Viewing Party.

Willie Sorlien, owner and proprietor over at Haiku Bandit Society, linked the last line to a great Traffic video. Go watch it, it’s pretty much in the spirit of the haiku, and the video has cool images of its own.

February 17: Numerical Order

“To Really Learn, Quit Studying and Take a Test” (New York Times)

..

seven or eight

sparrows

count them again

..

This haiku appeared on this blog last May, and on Haiku News last week (with the headline above).

For some reason, even though I wrote it in pretty much my first week of writing haiku, it is still one of my favorites of my own poems. Beginner’s luck, I guess.

Why do I like it so much? (You don’t have to ask so incredulously.) Well…first of all, there’s the whole “it’s true” thing. It’s impossible to count birds. (Impossible for me, anyway; maybe you’ve had better luck.) They keep moving. They’re transient, they’re transitory.

So many things in life are. You can’t pin them down. You look one minute and things look one way; the next minute they look entirely different. Don’t even ask about the differences between years.

But for some reason we (and by “we” I mean “I”) keep trying to get some kind of firm fix on the situation, whatever the situation is. Seven or eight sparrows? Well, does it matter? Rationally, no … but so much of life is spent trying to count those damn sparrows.

Also, I like numbers. I like numbers in general; I like arithmetic; I count things and add and subtract and multiply things all the time, just for the hell of it. Give me your phone number and I’ll tell you something interesting about the digits in, like, four seconds. “The sum of the first three digits is the product of the last two digits!” Or something. It’s a little weird. Kind of Junior Rain Man. (I do know the difference between the price of a car and the price of a candy bar, though.  So your longstanding suspicion that I really should be institutionalized has not yet been entirely confirmed.)

I like numbers in poetry because they are so specific. Other things being equal, generally the more specific a poem is the more powerful it is, so numbers to me seem like high-octane gas or something for poetry.

Gabi Greve, on her mindblowingly complete haiku website, has a great page about numbers in haiku. Here are a couple of my favorites of the examples she gives:

咲花をまつ一に梅二は櫻
saku hana o matsu ichi ni umi ni wa sakura

waiting for the cherry blossoms
one is the sea
two is the cherry tree

— Ishihara 石原重方

.

ビタミン剤一日二錠瀧凍る
bitamiinzai ichi nichi ni joo taki kooru

vitamin pills
each day two of them –
the waterfall freezes

— Ono Shuka (Oono Shuka) 大野朱香

Also, Issa is great at haiku that feature numbers. (Does this surprise you? I thought not.) A few examples, all translated by David Lanoue (and if you want more you should go over to David’s spectacular database of Issa translations and type your favorite number in the search box):

three raindrops
and three or four
fireflies

.

houses here and there
fly kites, three…four…
two

.

three or five stars
by the time I fold it…
futon

.

rainstorm–
two drops for the rice cake tub
three drops for the winnow

.

lightning flash–
suddenly three people
face to face

.

mid-river
on three or four stools…
evening cool

.

cool air–
out of four gates
entering just one

.

on four or five
slender blades of grass
autumn rain

.

a five or six inch
red mandarin orange…
winter moon

and one of my favorites of all time —

first snowfall
one, two, three, four
five, six people

Interesting how many of these involve the kind of uncertainty about exact count that my own haiku does. I don’t remember whether I had read any Issa at the time I wrote it. I might have been shamelessly imitating him, or I might just have been trying to count sparrows. You try it. It’s not as easy as it sounds.

February 14 (Your Kiss)

your kiss
the last chocolate
in the box

_______________________

This first appeared on Gillena Cox’s blog Lunch Break a few days ago. It was her birthday, and she very sensibly solicited haiku about chocolate to make her life delicious during the first couple of weeks of February.

Gillena is a lovely person and poet (well, she’s an Aquarius, what do you expect?), go over there and wish her a happy Valentine’s Day and a belated happy birthday.

February 6: You Say It’s Your Birthday

.
for my birthday
I suppose
the moon
.

_____________________________________________________________

.

For my birthday (yes, it’s today), I gave myself permission to write another haiku about the moon (despite their currency being even more debased than that of haiku about snow). Or rather, to post another haiku about the moon that I wrote a while ago and saved up for my birthday.

I’m giving myself another present, too. I decided to do this last weekend, when I had been sitting at my kitchen table staring at my computer for about nine hours, mostly performing various haiku-related chores delightful activities (no, seriously) like writing the Haikuverse and preparing journal submissions and replying to fascinating blog comments and visiting everybody else’s fascinating blogs and figuring out what tanka were all about anyway. Finally I realized it was going to be dark soon and I quickly stood up on my wobbly legs and put on my running shoes and headed outside.

The air was cold and the light was pure and as I walked the air started flowing more freely to my brain, and within about ten minutes I felt a sense of deep peace and I said to myself, “Self,” I said, “I give you permission not to blog every single day anymore. Because this is getting crazy.”

I know. I know I said I would post a haiku every day for a year, and it’s only been nine months and change. But think about it. Nine months is a long time. In nine months I could have created an entire new human being from scratch. (I’m familiar with the technique involved.) Though I did do this, in a way. I created, or rather re-created, myself.

Okay, melodrama. I know. I hate it too. But in this case I don’t feel that this is too strong a statement. Before I started this blog, I had been wandering around aimlessly through most of my adult life with an unfocused desire to write stuff, but not really sure what that stuff was, or what exactly I had to say. I never finished much of anything I started writing. I lost track of it halfway through; it stopped seeming important or interesting. I was starting to think maybe I wasn’t really a writer after all, except that I had an uncomfortable awareness that the only time I ever felt completely aware and fulfilled and alive was when I was writing something.

And then haiku came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder and quietly told me to give it a try, and since I wasn’t doing much of anything else at the time I said, “Okay.” On a whim I wrote a few haiku, on a whim I started a blog. As it turned out, this was kind of like going to a party on a whim and meeting the love of your life. Yeah … we’ve been chatting each other up for the last nine months, haiku and I, finding out all the things we have in common, marveling at the similarity of our personal philosophies, sharing our hopes and dreams for the future … at this point, I have to say, it’s pretty much impossible to imagine living without each other.

Which is to say, the reasons for my promising, back in May, to post a haiku every day for a year have essentially been rendered moot. I wanted to make a commitment to a body of writing and not give up on it for a change. I wanted to heal myself of my perfectionism and my reluctance to put any writing out in the world in case someone saw it and laughed at it. Well, none of these things are problems anymore. In fact, the problem I have now is that I would rather write haiku, and read haiku, and write about reading and writing haiku, and communicate with my fellow haiku enthusiasts, than do pretty much anything else. And I have a lot of other things to do. You know, school, and work, and laundry, and interacting with my family more than five minutes a day.

Also, it was fine for a while for me to just write any old haiku and slap it up on the blog without much thought, because I didn’t really know any better. But if I want to grow as a poet I have to not just write a lot of haiku, I have to take the time to live with them, and think about them, and revise them, and make them not just good-enough, but the best they can be. I’m not talking about perfectionism, I’m talking about craftsmanship; I’m talking about artistic integrity … oh God, is this starting to sound pretentious?

You do know what I mean, don’t you? At some point it’s not respectful to your art, or to your audience, to produce too much. To churn out publications just for the sake of publication. I mean, I still write haiku like there’s no tomorrow, but it’s starting to make me slightly sick to post things here that either I think are not really worth anyone’s time to read, or else that I could make even better if I took the time. It’s not that I’m afraid that you’ll laugh at me and point as I walk by and say, “Look, there goes the mediocre haiku poet!” It’s more just that I’m resentful of the time I spend putting up poems on this site that I don’t respect a whole lot instead of writing better poems.

I’m not going away. And the site certainly isn’t going away, it will be here indefinitely as far as I’m concerned. I’ll probably still be posting two or three times a week — you know, when I have something worth saying. I hope you’ll think it’s worth saying, anyway. I hope you’ll keep dropping by. This blog has transformed my life so profoundly — and just writing haiku wouldn’t have done that on its own. The presence of all you fantastic readers, and correspondents, and supporters, and friends is what has made the biggest difference. Not writing in isolation, wondering if I’m crazy. (I mean of course I am crazy, but most of the time you’re nice enough not to point it out.)

Thanks for once again listening to me as I go on and on interminably. (Admit it — you’re a little relieved that you won’t have to deal with that every single day anymore, aren’t you?) Someday, I promise, I am going to learn to pare my prose down the way I pare down haiku.

_____________________________________________________________

another slice
of birthday cake
and life

 

February 3 (Another snow)

another snow
another chance to change
the subject

.

(First published in World Haiku Review, January 2011)
________________

I hope all of you who live in the 33 U.S. states that were pounded by the blizzard yesterday are dug out by now. Or that if you aren’t, you have plenty to read and eat (in that order) and some way of staying warm. And a nice view out your window.

By the way, this does not fall under my snow haiku moratorium because I wrote it a long time ago — back in December, when it was not yet a federal crime for haiku poets to write haiku about snow — and it was just published in the very interesting journal World Haiku Review, about which I will be writing more next week, when it is not so close to my bedtime.

(For those of you that are mourning the snow haiku [what, are you crazy?] I will point you in the direction of this page that lists 10 highly worthwhile snow poems, most of which are not haiku but one of which is Issa, and famous, spectacular Issa. Go ahead, take a look, I won’t report you to the feds.)

January 31 (The Calendar)

January
not knowing what to do
with the old calendar

_________________

Caribbean Kigo Kukai, January 2011 (kigo: calendar)

January 21: Belated Rabbits

new year
a new friend becomes
an old friend

.

folding
away the year
paper rabbit

.

new year
opening the door
for a friend

.

new year
friends multiply
like rabbits

.

Year of the Rabbit
I give away
the litter

.

New Year
last year’s mistakes mended
with snow patches

 

_______________

.

Yes, New Year’s was three weeks ago. But frankly, classes and work started this week for me and I haven’t had a lot of time to write so once again I’m plagiarizing from myself, in this case from the haiku that I included with the book that I sent to the winner of my present giveaway in December, Alegria Imperial, which just arrived at her home in Canada even though I sent it several weeks ago. I think the customs officials took the book out and read it before sending it on to Alegria, personally. I commend their literary taste.

I think the theme(s) here are pretty obvious. But in case you’re unsure, Alegria was kind enough to take pictures of the contents of her package and post them on her lovely blog, jornales, so if you’re interested in visuals, hop on over there and take a look.

I hope the Year of the Rabbit has been a lucky one for you so far.

January 3: Shiki Kukai results

winter sky the way we sleep under that blanket

— nineteenth place 🙂 , december 2010 shiki kukai, kigo category (kigo: winter sky)

.

new moon she practices taking off
her ring

— seventh place, december 2010 shiki kukai, free format category (topic: ring)

.

I submitted both of these as traditional three-line ku and that is of course the way they appear over at the Shiki Kukai site. But I like them better this way. Insofar as I like them at all, which is not a whole heck of a lot.

And yes, nineteenth place is as unimpressive as it sounds. 🙂 But hey, somebody voted for it!

The Shiki Kukai is really fun, actually — you send in some ku and in a week or so they send you a list of over a hundred other ku on the same subject and you get to try to decide which ones you like the best. You should try it. I would like to try to guess which ones were yours on the list. I also like seeing my friends’ names in the list of winners. So go for it. They’ll be announcing the topics for January soon.

 

The 400 Posts (An Invitation)

Dear readers,

It’s that time again: Round number time. I’m coming up on my 400th post. (January 12th, if my calculations are correct.)

I like to celebrate these little occasions by giving you a break from me for a day and inviting you all to be my guest bloggers. (Note: This is an idea for which I am indebted to Matt Morden of Morden Haiku, who did this for his thousandth post a while back.)

The details, for those who haven’t played before or need a refresher course:

• By “you” I mean “anyone who has ever commented on my blog.” (If you haven’t commented before and want to participate, go ahead and comment sometime before the 12th and you’re in.)
• By “participate” I mean “send me one or two of your haiku, tanka, senryu, gogyoghka, haiga or other forms of Japanese short-form poetry or micropoetry.” Published or unpublished, I don’t care. Don’t agonize over whether they are good enough. They are. See below.
• Let me know what name, or haiku name, or alias, or other identifying information you wish to sign your poems with. If you have a blog or webpage or a Twitter or Tumblr account or some other online presence you want me to alert people to, include that information too.
• These poems will ALL (OK, I guess I reserve the right to leave out anything I find in mind-bogglingly bad taste, but I can’t really believe any of you are less squeamish than I am) be posted here on January 12th.
• They will not be judged, juried, or edited. They will be cut and pasted into my blog. They will be signed with whatever ID and URL you sent me.
• This entire thing will be wildly entertaining and inspiring for everyone involved. Really. That’s what everyone always tells me. It is really fun to see all the different styles of poetry by all the different participants. And, perhaps most important, not have to read anything I’ve written for an entire day. (Except my obligatory interminable introductory essay. I’ll try to keep it snappy this time, though.)
• I really want YOU (that’s right, buster) to send me your stuff. It’s only fair, you’ve been reading mine all this time. Sharing is nice.
• The deadline is 7 a.m. U.S. Central Standard Time on January 12. If you’re not sure how that translates to your local time, Google it. I will post sometime in the couple of hours after that.
• Don’t leave your submissions in the comments, it spoils the surprise for the other readers. Email them to MelissaLAllen AT yahoo.com.
• Any other questions? Go ahead and ask.
• Have fun!

Your blog friend,

Melissa

January 2 (Still Playing)

evergreen
still playing by
last year’s rules

Presenting (One Present, and Lots of New Year’s Greetings)

“Happy New Year” in Japanese, as illustrated by a couple of lovely women at the folk-traditions festival I just spent several days at. Those books it’s sitting on are all the haiku- and Japanese-literature-related books I am currently reading. I highly recommend all of them.

So a couple of weeks ago I offered to give one of you a present. And all you had to do in return was cut off the pinky finger on your right hand and mail it to me … wait, was that not your understanding of the deal? Oh, okay, all you really had to do was comment on the blog sometime between then and yesterday, and then hope you got lucky in the present lottery.

This is how the present lottery worked: I made a list of everyone who commented in the appropriate time period, numbered them in the order they commented, and then went to look for the teenager. I found him in his mad-scientist lab in the basement, crouched over a computer hooked up to a number of unidentifiable electronic parts, typing gobbledygook into a little window. (He does this kind of thing a lot. I’m always a little afraid that someday the Interwebs will explode and I’ll find out it was his fault.)

I said to him, “Hey, quit typing your gobbledygook and make me a random-number generator to pick a random number between 1 and 18. Because that’s how many people commented on my blog and I have to give one of them a present and I want this to be a completely scientific, unbiased process.”

He gave me a strange look, but obediently (he is a good boy, really, despite the exploding Interwebs), he opened another little window, typed some different gobbledygook, Googled some stuff real quick, typed more gobbledygook, and then said, “Four.” I am trusting that he did actually create a random number generator and didn’t just pick a number out of his head to make me go away. But whatever, four it is.

And the winner is … Alegria Imperial, whose wonderful blog jornales you must all go take a look at right now. Her New Year haiku there is great — it features a rabbit stole, which I love because I have never read another haiku about a rabbit stole. Also it is a refreshing variation on all the other New Year rabbit haiku floating around out there right now. (2011 is the Year of the Rabbit, in case you had somehow managed not to find this out despite the fact that every single haiku poet in the universe has written a New Year’s haiku with a rabbit reference in it in the last week. I’m not saying this is a bad thing. You can never have too many haiku about rabbits, as far as I’m concerned. I’m just jealous because I haven’t been able to write a good one yet myself.)

So the present, as I mentioned in my original post, is a copy of Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country, which I completely-on-purpose-but-utterly-foolishly purchased a copy of at a used bookstore even though I already own one. The really great thing is that, as she mentioned in her comment, Alegria already owns one too! But it’s one of her favorite books and it’s beginning to get a little decrepit, and she was wanting another copy. So off it goes to sit on the shelf next to its brother. (Email me your snail mail address, Alegria!)

By an amazing coincidence, on Christmas Day Kuniharu Shimizu, at his fantastic haiga site see haiku here, wrote a post featuring a haiga inspired by Snow Country, along with a brief commentary. (I really recommend you visit his site to see the wonderful photo that accompanies the haiku.)

traveling alone
the other end of the tunnel
is a snow country

“I can almost hear someone in the car yelling, ” Hey, close the window, shut the cold wind out”.
This photo reminded me of Kawabata, Yasunari’s “Snow Country”. The haiku got a hint from the first sentence of the novel.

When I had chance to visit the same snow country, which is in Niigata, I took Jyoetsu Shinkan-sen train. It is the super express train with fixed window so nobody cannot open it. When a long tunnel ended, snow covered fields and mountains of Echigo-Yuzawa sprawled before my eyes. It was so nice to view such a pristine landscape from the warm and comfortable seat of the train.

— Kuniharu Shimizu

And it’s been so nice over the last eight months to view the landscape of the haiku world from the warm and comfortable seat of this blog, surrounded by so many wonderful traveling companions. I wish I could send you all presents. But I’ll give you what I can: My deepest gratitude to all of you for reading, writing back, and sharing your lives and thoughts and writing with me. I wish you all the happiest of New Years.

December 28 (Evergreen)

evergreen
he never
believed
he’d run out
of time

___________________

yeah, I know, five lines. so I guess that makes this a tanka, or a gogyoghka, or something. or else a really incompetent haiku.

I really need to research tanka and gogyoghka. I have been trying not to pay attention to them because haiku are time-consuming enough, and also usually when I read tanka I have this feeling like, “This would be a really great haiku if you cut out two lines.” But so many people seem to swear by them, so maybe I should get with the program.

December 25: Nativity

Nativity scene
every year we think we’ve lost
the baby

.

Nativity scene
the shepherds are guarding
flocking

.

Nativity scene
the light in the stable
burned out

.

Nativity scene
folding a crane to replace
the broken angel

.
Nativity scene
the Wise Men never let go
of their gifts

.
Nativity scene
Joseph stares out
of the window
.

Nativity scene
the animals eye the manger
hungrily

.
Nativity scene
Mary hides
from the visitors

.
Nativity scene
packing away the miracle
for next year

.

A very Merry Christmas to all my readers who are celebrating the holiday today. Thanks for all your well-wishes this season and all your support this year. Much joy to you and your families.