It was just like this:
A jumble of syllables
That stumbled and hissed.
Nature’s magic wand
Could always conjure a frog
Plopping in a pond
And cherry blossoms,
Images that didn’t fit
My topic: possums.
We learned about trees
And onomatopoeia—
The whoosh of a breeze.
Rhyme was forbidden,
But those raised on Dr. Suess
Put hats on kittens.
And when we were done,
There was a test to measure
What should have been fun.
Some felt we’d been tricked,
But I hoped that in fifth grade
We’d write limericks.
is a regular contributor to haiku, haibun, and tanka journals. His fiction, nonfiction,
and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Flash, Rattle, Modern Haiku,
KYSO Flash, MacQueen’s Quinterly, SurVision, Haibun Today, The Haibun
Journal, and Contemporary Haibun Online (the latter for which he served
as content editor from July 2014 thru January 2020).
His chapbook of haibun, tanka prose, and prose poems, Ethiopian Time (Red Bird
Chapbooks, 2014), was an honorable mention in the Touchstone Book Awards. His chapbook
Conversation Starters in a Language No One Speaks (SurVision Books, 2018) was
a winner of the James Tate Poetry Prize in 2018. He is also the author most recently
of a collection of prose poems, haibun, and senryu, My Thology: Not Always True
But Always Truth (Cyberwit, 2019); and an e-chapbook, What I Say to You
(proletaria.org, 2020).
