why do we keep doing the same things, she says to me every morning. I don’t have an answer. Would you like a sandwich, I ask. It’s not much of a conversation but we know what we’re talking about. She sits on the sofa, her face soft-lit by the glow of the computer screen, headphones straddling her head, and repeats Portuguese phrases over and over. It sounds like she’s had a stroke but it’s just a lesson on making plurals. I putz around in the kitchen, bang some pots and pans, and make some beans and rice. It could be lunch. It could be dinner. It could disappear into the freezer. The day passes in a haze of telepathic bliss. When it’s bedtime, I sometimes remind her that she doesn’t need pajamas to sleep with me.
waning moon
we walk the other way
around the block
is a regular contributor to haiku and tanka journals in the US, Europe, and Australia,
and his work has been widely anthologized. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have
appeared or are forthcoming in numerous international journals, including Flash,
Rattle, Modern Haiku, KYSO Flash, MacQueen’s Quinterly, SurVision, Haibun
Today, 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).
