A kid yells at me from a schoolyard across a busy street. I turn and shrug my shoulders to let him know I can’t hear him. He does that megaphone thing we all do with our hands and yells again, “Hey Mister! Mister! You have hair like a horse’s tail.” I pause for a second to register I’ve understood him and then I paw the ground with my right foot and trot down the road. It’s possible he may have called me a horse’s ass, but I’m making progress.

spring breeze
loosening my ponytail
mid-stride

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