Bob Lucky


Eisegesis

Scour the folklore and superstitions of all cultures and you will find that what binds us together is the demented belief that it’s good luck if a bird craps on you. Pigeons and seagulls have made it their mission to bestow good luck on me. Sparrows have tried but their aim is erratic.

Last week, a pair of mottled pigeons on a balcony spattered me. I froze like a mime enacting a Jackson Pollack canvas. This morning I was dive bombed by two seagulls flying in formation. It was a highly coordinated saturation bombing, making me think that there might be some intelligent design in the universe.

I’m tired of being the chosen one.

Love is

(a blackout poem based on E. E. Cummings’ “[love is more thicker
than forget],” from Complete Poems 1904-1962.)

The Great Task

(a blackout poem based on The Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln)

 

The Table

The sun glared through the window and spread its light across the unfinished oak table like ghee melting in a warm skillet. Several stains marked the table top, overlapping wine glass and coffee cup stains, spatters of grease of some kind, a soy sauce stain. Although there were only three chairs at the table, there were four place mats, like those found at markets in Yangon, colorful versions of the bamboo mats used to make sushi rolls. A man was reading a book, but the book wasn’t on the table.

Bob Lucky, the author of Ethiopian Time, Conversation Starters in a Language No One Speaks, My Thology: Not Always True But Always Truth, and the e-chapbook What I Say to You, lives in Portugal with his wife and a jangle of ukuleles.

 
 

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