are in the garage. My uncle is angry. Maybe my cousin and I aren’t doing what we’re supposed to be doing, like cleaning up the place, or maybe we’re doing what we aren’t supposed to be doing, like looking at “baseball cards” of topless women. I can’t remember.

spring cleaning
saving a stash
of dirty mags

My cousin says he’s going to run away from home. “Get going,” my uncle says. And he does. I freeze. My uncle asks me, “What are you going to do?” I want to say stop my cousin, but nothing intelligible can pry my lips apart. I can’t remember. “Get going,” my uncle says.

spring breeze
a fleeting memory
of cottonwood fluff

The rest of the afternoon is like that John Cheever short story “The Swimmer,” kind of. I’m always about a backyard and a half behind my cousin, shouting at him to stop. Neighbors who know us laugh. Someone offers me a hotdog. A hamburger. I can’t remember.

cloudless sky
the smell of lighter fluid
heavy in the air

Years later over beers, I remind him of this incident. He doesn’t remember it.

family reunion
no one can agree
on a date

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

⚡ A Posthumous Lesson From My Mother and The Party, two haibun by Bob Lucky which were nominated by MacQ for the Red Moon Anthologies, and selected for publication in Contemporary Haibun 17 (Red Moon Press, 2022).

⚡ Featured Poet: Bob Lucky in Issue 10 of MacQ