I won’t win any housekeeping awards, 
find no Zen enlightenment in sweeping 
or mopping and don’t care for the buzz 
of a vacuum cleaner. But you should know 
that the cobwebs you see in the corners 
of my home, abandoned or harboring a spider, 
are shrines I maintain. I let them grow dusty, 
ignore the occasional carcass twisting 
in the breeze of a fan, the dangling threads. 
I do not revere or worship spiders of any species, 
but they do not buzz about my plate at dinner 
or in my ears while I sleep; they do not 
taunt me or suck my blood. What endears me 
to them and their ragged webs is the fact 
they eat flies and mosquitoes and never get sick, 
unlike the cat that has panic attacks at the squeak 
of a mouse and throws up the dry food I feed 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

⚡ Scribble Away: Notes from Bahrain, March 2022, haibun sequence by Bob Lucky which was shortlisted for the inaugural Touchstone Award for Individual Haibun

⚡ 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