When her message popped up in my inbox, I was disinclined to read it. After 40 years, what could she say to me that she hadn’t said before? I sat on it for three days, letting my dread and anticipation ripen. “Are you still alive?” she asked. “I’m dying, and dying to know!” How does one respond to something like that? Congratulations aren’t in order. And how did she get my email address? “I’m not dead yet,” I replied a couple days later, but I never heard back.

creaky rocking chair
my death poem
under revision

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

⚡ Scribble Away: Notes from Bahrain, March 2022, haibun sequence by Bob Lucky which was shortlisted for the inaugural Touchstone Award for Individual Haibun

⚡ 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