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Image by C. G.

The Armchair Daoist Meditates 

Car horns. Truck horns. The old man who chats up the florist downstairs every afternoon is trying his luck again. Sirens. The clomp of footsteps on the stairs. A dog barks. And barks. Music of a sort barrels out of the barbershop. In brief periods of relative silence, the whack of the butcher’s cleaver. Again. And again: horns and sirens. The hum of traffic, tires on wet road. Church bells announce the hour, some on daylight savings time, some not. The seamstress across the street wishes someone a good weekend. The hiss of air brakes, buses pulling up to the stop. The baby next door wails—for food, for attention, in pain? The baby next door. The baby. The baby.

 

deep breath

the tap of rain

on a window

Image by Spencer Arquimedes

The Last Bedtime Story

You’re lying again. The cow didn’t jump over the moon. 

 

From where I’m sitting it sure looks that way.

 

You’re lying again. The Man in the Moon didn’t squirt milk into his mouth. 

 

Well, he should have. I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt.

 

You’re lying again. It wasn’t chocolate milk. 

 

Ah, so it was milk and the Man in the Moon surely had a taste, and for that to happen the cow must have jumped over the moon.

 

What moon? What cow? What man?

​

 

moon viewing

the curtain wide open

now

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Bob Lucky is the author of Ethiopian Time (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014), Conversation Starters in a Language No One Speaks (SurVision Books, 2018), My Thology: Not Always True But Always Truth (Cyberwit, 2019). His work has appeared in Rattle, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Otoliths, and other journals. He lives in Portugal.

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