Bob Lucky
Limping Around the Bullring Memory
shelling pecans
my father’s dream for me
not mine
Out of college, adrift, considering graduate school, I decided to become a bullfighter. I went to the library, read a little Hemingway, and then I took off for Spain, disappointing a girlfriend and my parents. Along the way, I pulled a muscle in the arch of my right foot and could barely hobble down the street to a café in Málaga.
afternoon beer
the montera above the bar
collecting dust
From my roof-top room, a cubicle in a forest of drying laundry, I looked in the direction of Morocco and reread Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and then trained to Paris and London, down and out as Orwell, or so I imagined, finally catching a standby flight home and going to graduate school. Almost everyone was happy.
lingering dream
the last almond blossom
not letting go
About the Author
Bob Lucky‘s books include My Wife & Other Adventures (Red Moon Press, 2024), My Thology: Not Always True But Always Truth (Cyberwit, 2019) and Conversation Starters in a Language No One Speaks (SurVision Books, 2018), a winner of the 2018 James Tate Poetry Prize. Lucky lives in Portugal, where he is working his way through all the regional cheeses and wines.