A passenger pebble hitches a ride inside your walking shoe. You’re in a hurry and don’t have time to stop in this busy airport. You think, it’ll be okay; I don’t have far to go. Your stride shortens to accommodate. The gravel doesn’t settle back down. It rattles around and occupies more and more of your attention—a mental welt. Like a long exposure: the movements pile up and fray definition. A rough attempt at distraction, I’m bigger than this: the bait and switch. You change anchor, thoughts pivot. This annoyance quickly becomes cloven—divided yet still fully joined together.

Untitled B&W photograph (2018, at Tucson airport)

Copyrighted © by John Levy. All rights reserved.
Reproduced here with his permission.

Cherie Hunter Day

lives in northern California among seventeen thirsty redwoods. Her short prose and poems have appeared in 100 Word Story, KYSO Flash, Mid-American Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Modern Haiku, Moon City Review, Quarter After Eight, SmokeLong Quarterly, Unbroken, and Wigleaf. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and widely anthologized.

Recent anthologies include Nothing Short of 100 (Outpost 19, 2018), NOON: An Anthology of Short Poems (Isobar Press, 2019), and Contemporary Haibun 17 (Red Moon Press, 2022). Her recent books include a prose poem e-chapbook, Qualia (White Knuckle Press, 2017), and an award-winning collection of short poetry, for Want (Ornithopter Press, 2017). A new collection of short poetry, Miles Deep in a Drum Solo, is forthcoming from Backbone Press in late spring 2022.

John Levy

is a poet and photographer who lives in Tucson. His poetry titles include Oblivion, Tyrants, Crumbs (First Intensity Press, 2008) and two that were published by otata’s bookshelf: Silence Like Another Name (2019) and On Its Edge, Tilted (2018). Two issues of his photo collaboration with Alan Chong Lau, eye2word: Issue One and eye2word: Issue Two: Japan, were published online in 2019 by otata’s bookshelf.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ 42R Mill Street, haibun by Cherie Hunter Day which was nominated by MacQ for the Red Moon Anthologies, and selected for publication in Contemporary Haibun 17 (Red Moon Press, 2022).

⚡ Crow Hat, ekphrastic prose poem by Cherie Hunter Day after a photograph by John Levy, in KYSO Flash (Issue 12, Summer 2019)