Sammie’s a pediatric oncologist. The do-gooder kind. Curing kids with leukemia and shit. Sammie’s sexy too, big boobs and curvy hips. My husband says she looks like one of those doctors in a porno flick and he ought to know. I’m fat with frizzy hair, like Nancy in the old comics. Look it up. The point is, Sammie has it all. Her husband sells vintage cars to A-listers. Two perfect sons. At Harvard. I’m in the retail biz. The Box Store. I’m a floater. My boss moves me around. This week I’m in adult hygiene products. You’d be surprised how many hot-shot career women, the kind with walk-in closets full of black lace bras, wear disposable diapers. Anyhoo, guess who walks down my aisle today? No need to tell the family, she says. Then says she’s buying them for a friend. I nod my head and pretend to go along. I can’t wait to tell my other cousin. The one on my father’s side.

—From the author’s book-in-progress, a collection of fiction (micro and flash): The Years Go By in Single File

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

⚡ Featured Guest: Roberta Beary on Rattlecast 133 hosted by Tim Green, editor of Rattle poetry journal (YouTube, 28 February 2022)

⚡ 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)