1. No one is holding hands although one couple, gripping forks, is kissing over their raspberry tart.
2. A young girl dances on the seawall. The music is in her head. The waves, the waves have a rolling rhythm but can’t keep a beat.
3. The lifeguard limps in again to use the toilet. Any drowning person needs to be able to hold his or her breath at least as long as a whizz and a 20-second hand wash, assuming the lifeguard washes his hands.
4. Nougat-colored clouds stretched thin like ribbons of taffy drift inland above the wind turbine. The whoosh whoosh whoosh of wind as the blades churn it, turn it into commodified energy.
5. The cashier has beautiful hands, hold-able hands, but she always has something in them—a pen, a credit card machine, a rag, a bill.
6. Sunset. Too much has been said about sunset.
fingering the change...
the blur of a sail
on the horizon
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).
