Years ago, I smuggled a zebra home after a safari in Tanzania. I kept it in the closet and never told anyone although I think my wife suspected. One weekend when our grandson Clark was visiting, he went exploring and wandered into the closet. We heard braying and then the clatter of hooves as the zebra galloped down the hallway. Clark was riding bareback, sliding from side to side and squealing, “Thanks, Grandpa. Thanks. This is the best present in the whole world!” “His name is Blazes,” I shouted as they burst through the door and into the suburban sunset.
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).
