“I heard you cry out. Another bad dream?” her husband asks. He eyes the breakfast strawberries. He likes them split exactly down the middle. Images float across her mind as her knife strikes the cutting board. Again and again. The bus driver who looks like her dad handing her a copy of the Kama Sutra. With a note inside. Instructing her to practice for tomorrow’s quiz. A hairbrush dipped in coconut oil. An open-robed priest blessing her. The taste of honey on his fingers. As she feels the flush of desire spread its wings she makes her decision. “Not that I recall,” she answers.

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 identifies as gender-expansive and writes to connect with the disenfranchised. She lives in the west of Ireland with her husband, Frank Stella, and 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.