|
|
 |
|
| Issue 30: | Sept. 2025 |
| Haibun: | 120 words |
By Bob Lucky
Desuetude
Walking past an after-school music academy, I hear the scritch scratch of tiny violins and flash back to dancing in elementary PE classes. It wasn’t about learning to dance so much as how to count. I can count now, but square dancing and the Hokey Pokey are distant memories to me. Then I start thinking about those articles that claim learning to play an instrument will make your child a wiz at math, potentially a genius. They never mention kids forced to take up violin rather than discover a noise that resonates. They never mention the tears and lifelong aversion to the word etude. Nothing like a smart bitter person.
spring breeze
the discordant urge
to rosin a bow
Bob Lucky’s
latest book is a collection of tanka and tanka prose, Careful Not to Startle the Yaks (Cyberwit, 2025). He is also the author of My Wife & Other Adventures (Red Moon Press, 2024); My Thology: Not Always True But Always Truth (Cyberwit, 2019); Conversation Starters in a Language No One Speaks (SurVision Books, 2018), a winner of the James Tate Poetry Prize; and Ethiopian Time (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014), an honorable mention in the Touchstone Distinguished Book Awards. He lives in Portugal.
More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond
⚡ Book Review: My Wife & Other Adventures by Rich Youmans in contemporary haibun online (20:3, December 2024)
⚡ Clare MacQueen’s enthusiastic endorsement of My Wife & Other Adventures: “a mondo memoir of tiny poetic narratives infused with [Lucky’s] signature wit, wordplay, and philosophical musings; a handbook of 63 haibun that takes us meandering on a taste tour through the Near and Far East, entertaining as it enlightens...”
⚡ Bob Lucky at Haikupedia.org (September 2024)
⚡ A Tribute and Commentary on Bob Lucky’s new collection, My Thology: Not Always True but Always Truth by Ray Rasmussen in cho (15:4, January 2020)
| Copyright © 2019-2025 by MacQueen’s Quinterly and by those whose works appear here. | |
| Logo and website designed and built by Clare MacQueen; copyrighted © 2019-2025. | |
|
Data collection, storage, assimilation, or interpretation of this publication, in whole or in part, for the purpose of AI training are expressly forbidden, no exceptions. |
At MacQ, we take your privacy seriously. We do not collect, sell, rent, or exchange your name and email address, or any other information about you, to third parties for marketing purposes. When you contact us, we will use your name and email address only in order to respond to your questions, comments, etc.