When people started to disappear, those of us still here began to worry. Who’s next, we’d ask, always assuming it would be someone else. After a while here today gone tomorrow began to make sense. Capitalism went into overdrive: protective creams, anti-disappearing pills of various colors and strengths, and after-life insurance for those who liked to have all their bases covered went on sale, always 50% off. New religions were born and re-born and born again into tax-exempt status. Where do the disappeared go, a television reporter asked a pundit, who, with the facts on the tip of his tongue, explained that they were still here, floating in the air with fecal matter and other particulates. He disappeared soon after, giving rise to a variety of conspiracy theories to keep us entertained or distracted, depending on the theory one subscribed to. I know one thing, it was harder to breathe.
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).
