We are grandparents. The age when most couples stay put. “We need something new,” I said as our Trader Joe’s fish defrosted in our suburban Maryland kitchen. “Why not sell the house? We’re retired and the kids are settled. And you know it’s been my dream to live abroad while we still can.” My dream, not his. He looked at me, his face inscrutable. Three years, two funerals, and two weddings later, we still eat fish for dinner. But it’s caught in Clew Bay, near our home in the shadow of Croagh Patrick. We’re old, we’re new, we’re together, in Ireland.

Lobster traps in Clew Bay, Ireland

Photographed and copyrighted by Roberta Beary. All rights reserved.

—Text and photograph published previously in The New York Times, “Tiny Love Stories: Modern Love in Miniature” (8 January 2019); both appear here with Beary’s permission.

Roberta Beary

is the haibun editor of Modern Haiku, the co-editor of Wishbone Moon: An Anthology of Haiku by Women (Jacar Press, 2018), and the author of three award-winning poetry collections, including The Unworn Necklace, which received a finalist book award from the Poetry Society of America. Her collection of prose poetry, Deflection (Accents Publishing, 2015), was named a National Poetry Month Best Pick by Washington Independent Review of Books.

Her writing has appeared in Rattle, KYSO Flash, 100 Word Story, Cultural Weekly, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and is also featured in A Companion to Poetic Genre (John Wiley & Sons, 2011) and Haiku In English: The First Hundred Years (W. W. Norton, 2013).

Roberta Beary lives in the west of Ireland with her husband, Frank Stella. She tweets her photoku on Twitter [at] shortpoemz.

Author’s website: https://robertabeary.com/news/

You can also find her on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/robertabeary/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ The art of brevity, an interview by Ciara Moynihan in Mayo News (22 January 2019)

⚡ Lunch Break, a haibun by Beary in Rattle (#56, Summer 2017), Tribute to Poets with Mental Illness; includes audio (17 July 2017)

⚡ Barfly, one of more than a dozen of Beary’s works which appear in KYSO Flash; for a list of others, see our Index of Contributors.