I never expected to outlive God, but I have. It’s a little late to put that on my resume, but I think it says something about my tenacity. According to an obituary in The Economist, God had a full life, but in the end all that smiting wore him out. When the obituary got to the obligatory He is survived by, it went straight to ellipsis. I suppose that too may have been a drain on his health.
I look around at the faces in the waiting room and realize God’s death isn’t foremost in people’s minds. I stand up and almost say to the multitude that all miracles have been cancelled, that they should take their hypertension and diabetes and acne, their erectile dysfunction and irritable bowels and broken hearts home and work on their relationships, but the receptionist calls me to the window and asks if I’ve tried to hang myself again and if my insurance is the same. No, I explain, I’ve just had a revelation. Take a seat, she says.
is a regular contributor to haiku and tanka journals in the US, Europe, and
Australia, and his work has been widely anthologized. His fiction, nonfiction, and
poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous international journals, including
Flash, Rattle, Modern Haiku, KYSO Flash, SurVision, Haibun Today, and
Contemporary Haibun Online (the latter for which he served as content editor
from July 2014 thru January 2020).
He is the author most recently of My Thology: Not Always True But Always Truth
(Cyberwit, 2019) and the chapbook Conversation Starters in a Language No One
Speaks (SurVision Books, 2018), which was a winner of the James Tate Poetry
Prize in 2018; and his chapbook of haibun, tanka prose, and prose poems, entitled
Ethiopian Time (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014), was an honorable mention in the
Touchstone Book Awards.
