I don’t like my phone, 
any phones really, but I have to 
check it sometimes to see 
if my wife is checking up on me. 
She’ll message, “How are you? 
Pick up some onions on your way home.” 
But usually she asks, “Where are you?” 
and I reply with a thumbs up, 
pretending to annoy her, 
to which she replies, 
“Pick up some onions.” 

This afternoon I was sitting 
in the shade outside my local café 
minding my own business 
and the one glass of wine a day 
I allow myself until I lose 
about three-hundred pounds. 
I put my notebook 
and Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life 
on the table next to my phone 
so it would look like 
I was doing something 
serious, not just nursing 
a generous pour of red wine. 

When I finished the wine, 
I slipped the notebook and Harvey 
into my knapsack and felt around 
for a vegetable bag 
in case I had to buy onions, 
and then I checked the phone. 
A sparrow had shat on the screen. 
I should have been upset, 
but how could I curse a bird 
that deserved a peck on the beak 
or in lieu of that a toast? 

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