After all you’ve done for them, it’s not too much to ask for a little conversation. Instead, you sit there in silence exchanging glances with one another as your middle-aged sons tap away at their phones, never looking up, lost in their digital world while believing they’re spending time with you. No doubt they assume you’ll pick up the tab for the coffee and pastries. I want to walk over and shake them but know that would upset you. I too have relatives and friends fond of their phones and sometimes feel abandoned. Like you, I sit there with my hands in my lap waiting for the moment to say “By the way” or “Did you know?” Perhaps your only recourse is to talk to them non-stop until they have you committed and then they can go back to their phones and send you messages.

last supper
heads bowed
into the glow

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