The first hour, I luxuriated in my pale silk bathrobe while reading glossy celebrity gossip. Then slipped off my robe and sank into the hot, milky bath for another hour. I admired the fluffy pink guest towel that turbaned my hair in a twist, the way my mother taught me. Next I sat with my potions before the double mirror as my eyes searched out the day’s wounds. I cured them with circular strokes of face cream, as my mother taught me. Now all slights have melted away. I am ready to welcome you back in my flannel pjs. The towel dry from the heated rack and neatly folded on the top shelf. And on the hook behind the door, the silk robe you say I never wear.

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). She recently judged the Sable Books Haiku Contest for Women Book Award, and she will present a haibun workshop at Flash Fiction Festival 2020.

Her writing has appeared in Rattle, KYSO Flash, 100 Word Story, Cultural Weekly, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly, 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/

You can also find her on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/robertabeary/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ 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)

⚡ Barfly, one of more than a dozen of Beary’s works which appear in KYSO Flash; for a list of others, see the KF Index of Contributors.