Winding among the low hills on the edge of town, Lincoln Way is almost ready for the contractors. The sewer and water mains are in and the underground electrical service. But development has stalled, and along the miles of brand new concrete with its signs bearing trendy street names like Sherwood Terrace and Lancelot Lane, there is only one streetlight. The place is convenient, it is secluded, the police don’t bother to patrol it, and the plows clear it all winter. The ones who go steady figure it out.

Today in some place far away you will rise at the usual hour and take up the routines of a normal day. With a little luck, everything will turn out just as you expect and another series of ordinary hours will quietly disappear without a trace. You would never guess that halfway across the world a wallet-sized image of you, faded and creased and dog-eared, has the same subtle force as a saint’s icon, that every day I remember you down to the last secret blemish, until all your fire and defiance, every raw edge is complete again, beautiful and innocent and perfect.

Even with the heater going full blast, frost grows thick on the insides of all the windows. It’s December and on the radio the late great Sam Cooke is singing a song that tries to point out for us how all this works.

Moonrise—

from the back seat of my first car, things we could not quite
make out.

Jeff Streeby

is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a nominee for the Best of the Net Anthology (Sundress Publications). His haibun “El Paso: July” was selected by judge Robert Olen Butler for inclusion in The Best Small Fictions of 2015, to be released in October, 2015, by Queen’s Ferry Press. He is a Senior Lecturer in English at Assumption University of Thailand in Bangkok.

www.jeffstreebyauthorizedsite.com

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Voyageur, an “imaginative” haibun in Contemporary Haibun Online (Vol. 7, No. 4, January 2012); includes comments by Ken Jones

⚡ Two Haibun in Ohio Edit (27 October 2014): “Custodes Caelestes” and “Along the North Platte”

⚡ Sheep Kill, a lineated poem in Rattle (Number 30, Winter 2008, Tribute to Cowby & Western Poetry)