The village council decides to embrace tourism as its savior and hires me to teach English lessons at the community center. It’s mandatory for city employees, but everyone seems keen. The classes are large, 50 to 60 students three times a week. I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m a retired professor of Chaucer hoping to meet a local widow, and I speak the local language like a four-year-old. After a month of How are you? and My name is___, I can see I’m losing them, so I find some transcripts of Seinfeld online, make multiple copies, and start showing video clips of the show in class. Before long the classes are meeting Monday through Friday and the village council has to buy more tables and chairs. I tell the men to imitate Jerry and the women to imitate Elaine. Not all students follow instructions, so in time we have a group of Georges and a group of Kramers. The village is now on the tourist map. There’s a statue of me near the public parking garage.

pigeon droppings
the white in my hair
spreading to my beard

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