porch talk
condensation on the pitcher
of iced tea

There’s a road with a hill as steep as a drop on a roller coaster. My grandfather used to take me there on summer weekends after we had visited farms for sale in places like Heidenheimer, where my father was born in a farmhouse. I think it was a reward for me spending an afternoon with him as he poked around barns and sheds and asked questions about the soil. It scared the shit out of me. He never did buy a farm, but I learned to scream and make it sound like I was thrilled to death every time we went down that hill.

afternoon shadows
a guard dog at the end
of its chain

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