I watch my wife wash the deck, which in our holiday-absence has become a public toilet for seagulls. “Can I help?” I ask. “No, I’ve got it,” she says, meaning don’t you dare come out here and tell me how to clean up bird shit. Other than going out later and turning the faucet off all the way, I’m happy to have her tell the seagulls where to take their business.

recycle day
a toilet bowl abandoned
between plastic and glass

For a dinner side, she takes chard of some bitter birth and crisps it in the oven with olive oil, sea salt, a handful of garlic, and red pepper flakes, and makes it edible. It’s good for me, which I’m loathe to admit, and tasty, which I indirectly concede with a satisfied grunt.

rising moon
up to my elbows
in a sudsy sink

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

⚡ Bar Talk, a haibun by Bob Lucky which was nominated by MacQ for the Red Moon Anthologies, and selected for publication in Contemporary Haibun 18 (Red Moon Press, 2023)

⚡ 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)