My beautiful farmhouse is a cowshed to her. Her ornamental chiles weeds to me. The way she plays the drums as if beating a snake to death annoys me. My using the kitchen table as a desk and leaving my shoes scattered around the house, including under the kitchen table, breaks numerous treaties. The way she whacks the blade edge of a knife against a pot’s rim to dislodge bits of chopped onion is unbearable. Yet when I crawl into bed long after she’s gone to sleep and she’s lying there motionless, breath imperceptible, I poke her to see if she’s alive. We have a bet on who’ll be the first to die.

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)