A naked cliché rolls out of bed as if nothing happened, and spiky sarcasm wobbles in circles on the floor. I turn off the morning news. My eyes burn from the dusty lexicon and my ears, stuffed and sticky with the meringue of opinions, no longer hear a word. Addicted to dictionaries, I lie in bed and flip pages, eager for etymologies that might illumine my existence—at least until the evening news.
winter chill one word leads to another
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).
