It was a day
of atmospheric oscillations:
sunshine, blustery wind,
pelting rain, sunshine,
blustery wind, pelting
rain, and then the wind
blew straight down
pushing the umbrella
on to my head
and buckling my knees
before it lifted me
to my feet as if
apologizing and then
turned the umbrella
inside out, turning me
into a mobile birdbath,
and as much as I want to
walk everywhere to save
the world, even in conditions
a mail carrier might quail at,
I hailed a cab.
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).
