Good weather brings out the worst in people. Windows go up and the most god-awful excuses for music come tumbling out like one-legged clog dancers. Drivers, especially those in convertibles hellbent to squeeze into the space in front of the car ahead of them, speed headlong into oncoming traffic as if heaven were having happy hour. Teenagers think they invented beer, never having read a thing about the Mesopotamians, and then forget to put on all their clothes. Dogs are let loose, and the dogs, not knowing what to think, piss and poo like it’s their last day on Earth. The next dog who humps my leg will have humped his last. Then the neighbors who rarely speak to you invite you over for dinner and ask if you’ll make the salad, but their knives haven’t been sharpened since they left the factory and you’re in the kitchen grumbling and banging garlic cloves wondering how you’re going to slice the tomatoes, and you’re convinced they’re not organic.
spring breeze
blowing the dust
off a silk rose
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).
