Curtain shadows ebb and flow across the floor. Peas ping into a metal bowl. The women sitting at the kitchen table are a mystery. I don’t remember seeing them before. And what’s going to happen to all these peas? I’ve only ever boiled them and tossed them with butter and salt. I pull a chair up to the table. None of the women mind my presence as long as I’m shelling peas.

warm breeze
a pile of pea pods
for this evening’s soup

After all the peas are shelled, a woman sweeping the floor asks, “You’re Jack, aren’t you?”

“No,” I say, tossing a pea out the window, “I’m his brother.”

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