Out of college, I stopped wearing blue jeans. Practicality trumped fashion, even identity. Jeans were heavy and took forever to dry, and I was traveling light and moving often, a frugal tourist and serial expat, hand washing my dirty laundry in sinks and tubs and shower stalls. I switched to dark-colored khaki pants that camouflaged stains, rolled up into a compact log that could be stuffed into a backpack, and would dry in a patch of sunlight. But yesterday, strolling through the mall to wait out a passing cloudburst, thinking about how my traveling days—due to age, cost, and Covid—will no doubt be chugging the way of the steam train, I stopped short in front of a shop window. A mannequin in a denim jacket and pre-faded jeans spoke to me, and I recognized the voice and stepped inside.
winter blues
an online quest
for cowboy boots
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).
