I see my dead brother wandering around the back yard. He doesn’t recognize me at first—I have aged—accuses me of stealing his BBQ pit.

We sold it, I tell him.

What gives you the right, he asks.

You were dead.

So what, he says, it was my BBQ.

He starts to come at me, like a crazed zombie, the kind in the movies, not the real ones.

We had to, I explain, the food off that grill tasted like crap after you died.

That stopped him long enough for me to slip into the garage and cover the BBQ pit with an old blanket. That guy never knew when I was screwing with him.

Bob Lucky

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, 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, is forthcoming. He now lives and works in Saudi Arabia.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ With Apologies to René Descartes, prose poem in The Prose-Poem Project (April 2013?)

⚡ 25 Tanka Prose: Introduction: TP or not TP, That Is the Question, by Bob Lucky, in Atlas Poetica: A Journal of Poetry of Place in Contemporary Tanka (July 2011)

⚡ Instructions, prose poem in The Prose-Poem Project (Volume 2, Issue 3, Winter 2011)

[Please click on Bob Lucky’s name at the top of “The Prose Poems” page in order to access poem; unfortunately, the direct link simply does not work as it should.]

⚡ Running with the Yaks, haibun in Contemporary Haibun Online (March 2008, Volume 4, Number 1)