He said we were going to buy milk. There were stairs to descend, a corridor to wander, and two sets of doors to pass through before we got to the street. We could’ve turned left or right, it didn’t matter, there are stores in every direction these days. We stood outside on the sidewalk waiting for the rain so that he could open his new umbrella and test it against the wrath of nature. Late Wednesday evening it finally rained, a little drizzle; the umbrella passed the test but all the stores were closed so he decided to take a walk. He went straight and that’s the last we saw of him. There was only one umbrella, and he took it with him.

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