The little truths are the heaviest, Tom said, the big ones too abstract to weigh much at all. All things must pass, for example, is like the air we breathe. We take it for granted. But a little truth is like an overweight suitcase you schlep through the world’s largest airport. Unless you’re a smuggler and working for someone else, everything in it is yours. If I tell you we’re all going to die, you’ll dismiss it with some offhand remark like Not yet or Live while you can, but if I tell you Jimmy’s found out his wife is sleeping with most of the wait staff and he’s in the toilet reading a manual on how to fire an automatic weapon, I’ll have your attention.
last call
the smoke alarm keeps winking
at me
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).
