I’m in Uruguay in search of the campo flicker, a bird so common it’s been invisible for years. Right under our noses, out of sight. My mother, a fierce woman with a broken wing, was last seen outside Bella Unión. Left to Argentina. Right to Brazil. No one agrees. Everyone tries to forget. I change the subject. Ask about another bird. The southern lapwing. But no one will talk to me after lunch even though I pick up the tab for about 13,000 people. It’s not my fault, I explain. But by then feathers are flying. I’m cursing in Portuguese just to be spiteful and some old woman slaps me and tells me I’m just like my mother. Take that, I say, and throw an unidentified egg in her direction. It goes sailing across the street, across the river. As if gravity has taken a coffee break. We all stop to watch. That way, the old woman says. That way, you fool.

—Third-Place Winner in the KYSO Flash Triple-F Writing Challenge

Bob Lucky

is a regular contributor to haiku and tanka journals in the US, Europe, and Australia, whose work has been widely anthologized. His works in 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).

Lucky’s chapbook of haibun, tanka prose, and prose poems, entitled Ethiopian Time (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014) was an honorable mention in the Touchstone Book Awards. He now lives and works in Saudi Arabia.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Reflections on Writing, Editing, and the Status of Haibun: An Interview with Bob Lucky by Ray Rasmussen in Haibun Today (Volume 9, Number 3, September 2015)

⚡ Some Notes on Paradise, from Lucky’s chapbook Ethiopian Time

⚡ Interview with Bob Lucky, Author of Ethiopian Time by West African writer and blogger Geosi Gyasi in Geosi Reads: A World of Literary Pieces (22 May 2015)