I miss the snowman with two charcoal eyes, a carrot nose and my green plaid scarf bought online for $1. I had no money in those days and a talent for sniffing out a bargain. Necessity is the mother of invention, which is another way of saying a full time job, two children and no husband.

One uninvited visit my mother said, you get what you pay for, her narrow eyes on the coat rack.

Even though I loved that green plaid scarf, loved the way the faux cashmere fell across my chest peeking over my black honeymoon coat, loved the way it never kept me warm, that day I dropped that scarf as easily as some men drop a wife.

I remember my mother said, at least now you have the pink Burberry I gave you last Christmas, and not that green rag. Which by the way, looks better on the snowman than it ever did on you.

When winter comes, I miss my mother, still there’s a kind of solace knowing the dead stay dead.

Roberta Beary’s

second collection of short poems, Carousel, is co-winner of the Snapshot Press 2019 book award contest. Her first short-form collection, The Unworn Necklace, received a finalist book award from the Poetry Society of America. Her collection of prose poetry, Deflection (Accents Publishing, 2015), was named a National Poetry Month Best Pick by Washington Independent Review of Books.

Long-time haibun editor of Modern Haiku, Ms. Beary is also co-editor of Wishbone Moon: An Anthology of Haiku by Women (Jacar Press, 2018), and she recently judged the Sable Books Haiku Contest for Women Book Award.

Her writing has appeared in Rattle, KYSO Flash, 100 Word Story, Cultural Weekly, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and The New York Times, and is also featured in A Companion to Poetic Genre (John Wiley & Sons, 2011) and Haiku In English: The First Hundred Years (W. W. Norton, 2013).

Ms. Beary lives in the west of Ireland with her husband, Frank Stella, and tweets her photoku and micro-poetry on Twitter [at] shortpoemz.

Author’s website: https://robertabeary.com/news/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Roberta Beary, haiku poet and editor, on writing Haibun, interview on YouTube (8 February 2021) with Mike Rehling, editor of Failed Haiku

⚡ Tiny Love Stories in The New York Times (8 January 2019); scroll five stories down the page for Roberta Beary’s “Now It’s All Fresh Fish” and her photograph of lobster traps in Clew Bay, Ireland.

⚡ The art of brevity, an interview by Ciara Moynihan in Mayo News (22 January 2019)

⚡ Lunch Break, a haibun by Beary in Rattle (#56, Summer 2017), Tribute to Poets with Mental Illness; includes audio (17 July 2017)