thunderstorm
another bolt of lightning
not even close

It was a clichéd evening, dark and stormy, raining cats and dogs, people wading ankle deep across roads into diners with dim bulbs hanging above grimy counters and dimmer bulbs sitting at the counters contemplating another shot of courage before sticking their oars back into the river of life in the gutters outside. And of all the greasy spoons in all the world, she had to walk into this one. I couldn’t for the life of me remember her name, but she had a nice smile and we talked until dawn. Could I give you a call sometime, I asked. You know my name, she said, look up the number. As I watched her walk out the door without taking an umbrella from the stand, it all came back to me like a bad dream, the déjà vu of the past slipping into the future. It was over before it started.

red sky
my newfound umbrella
unfurling

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 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 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 Lucky which was shortlisted for the inaugural Touchstone Award for Individual Haibun (2022)

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