I’ve no trust in my camel, Cecil. He could be my undoing. I’m harder to shake than the rest of the caravan, God rest their souls, but I’m slowly disappearing. I can put the canteen to my ear and hear the ocean’s roar. The food is down to a dented can of sardines, which doesn’t bode well for the sardines or me, and a handful of hay. For the last two nights, Cecil and I have eyed each other from opposite sides of the fire. I do have a pocketknife, but his teeth are so sharp. And he spits.
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).
