He and his brother and his cousin are sent off to Sunday school with a few coins to support some missionary somewhere far away bringing light into a sombrous jungle. Along the way, they buy bottles of soda pop and, pretending the local pond is a church, strip off their clothes for a cooling baptism in the turbid waters. When they get home, Granny asks them what they learned in Sunday school and they lie, lie, lie. Her eyes may be dim, but she can see the wool being pulled over them. Like a magician, she swipes her hand past his ear and produces a small clod of mud. And then the belt comes out and the whooping commences.

dragonfly buzz
what you think
you hear

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

⚡ Waiting for Godot to Leave, a haibun by Bob Lucky which was nominated by MacQ for the Red Moon Anthologies 2023, and selected for publication in Contemporary Haibun 19

⚡ Verisimilitude, a haibun by Bob Lucky which was nominated by outside editors for the Red Moon Anthologies 2023, and selected for publication in both: Contemporary Haibun 19 and upside down: The Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku 2023

⚡ Bar Talk, a haibun by Bob Lucky which was nominated by MacQ for the Red Moon Anthologies 2022, and selected for publication in Contemporary Haibun 18

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

⚡ A Posthumous Lesson From My Mother and The Party, haibun by Bob Lucky which were nominated by MacQ for the Red Moon Anthologies 2021, and selected for publication in Contemporary Haibun 17