new moon...
all the things I can’t see
clear to me now
I was raised on margarine, not because my mother thought it was healthier than butter but because it was cheaper. That was mid-20th century, when advertisers worked overtime
to convince us margarine tasted so good we would think it was butter. We should’ve figured something was up. Later I discovered butter and about twenty pounds.
Marriage was a smooth slide into the olive oil years. It wasn’t cheap, especially if you fell into the rabbit hole of cold-pressed virgins,
old twisted vines and stone mills. Now that death isn’t much
different than waiting for a lost Uber driver, I’m back into butter, but I like closure so I’ve bought a tub of margarine to keep in the fridge as a reminder
we often do the wrong thing for a good reason.
closing time
every crack in the sidewalk
a challenge
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).
