Sleep beneath a quilt made by Gertrude Stein once a week. If you don’t have a quilt made by Gertrude Stein, lie beneath one of Rimbaud’s mosquito nets. Sleep is important.

Sleep alone twice a month if you have a partner. Solitude is important.

Sleep with someone, anyone, twice a month if you don’t have a partner. Sex is important.

Bind your hands with large yellow rubber bands and climb into a lobster tank. A crab tank will also work. Empathy is important.

Eat alone once a day and talk to your stomach. Ask it questions. Easy ones at first. It is important that no one see or hear you. Privacy is important.

Keep a diary for a year, read it aloud in a public toilet, and then burn it. Practice is important.

Walk naked in the rain. Cleanliness is important.

Get lost in your own house before you get dementia. Preparedness is important.

Don’t read manifestos except to argue with them. That’s important.

Bob Lucky

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).

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ A Posthumous Lesson From My Mother and The Party, two haibun by Bob Lucky which were nominated by MacQ for the Red Moon Anthologies, and selected for publication in Contemporary Haibun 17 (Red Moon Press, 2022).

⚡ Featured Poet: Bob Lucky in Issue 10 of MacQ