I awoke this morning feeling as if I were missing a dream. All day I fossicked through my dream archive, separated the ones I didn’t remember from the ones I couldn’t forget, and even created a folder for those that keep recurring.

low fog
the farmer knee-deep
in muck

Most of those are anxiety dreams—forgotten appointments, unforgiving deadlines, showing up to work in my underwear. When evening came around, I still hadn’t found the dream I was missing, which made me miss it more.

shrouded moon
I open the window
all the way

Bob Lucky

is a regular contributor to haiku and tanka journals in the US, Europe, and Australia, and his work has been widely anthologized. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous international journals, including Flash, Rattle, Modern Haiku, KYSO Flash, The Prose-Poem Project, The Boston Literary Magazine, Haibun Today, and Contemporary Haibun Online (where he edits content).

He is the author most recently of the chapbook Conversation Starters in a Language No One Speaks (SurVision Books, 2018), which was a winner of the James Tate Poetry Prize in 2018; and his chapbook of haibun, tanka prose, and prose poems, entitled Ethiopian Time (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014), was an honorable mention in the Touchstone Book Awards. In February 2018, his haibun story Gratitude (nominated by KYSO Flash) was named Runner-Up for Vestal Review’s VERA Award.

Lucky lives and works in Saudi Arabia.