“Before the Outing” by Roberta Beary

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Deflection

i

my son’s boyfriend
three words i practice saying
alone in my room

ii

rainbow flag
father pretends
not to see

iii

not something
that’s contagious
still you step back
from my son
and his boyfriend

iv

rainbow flag
mother tiptoes around
the subject

v

with knife in hand
my son’s lover dissects
the last white peach

–Roberta Beary,
Deflection
(Accents Publishing)

Roberta BearyRoberta Beary is the haibun editor of Modern Haiku; she tweets her photoku @shortpoemz. Her book The Unworn Necklace was named a William Carlos Williams finalist by the Poetry Society of America in 2008, the first such honor for a book of haiku. A frequent judge of haiku and haibun contests, she travels worldwide to give workshops on the art of the short poem. Her poetry is featured in the reference work A Companion to Poetic Genre (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) and in the anthologyHaiku In English The First Hundred Years (Norton, 2013). www.robertabeary.com.

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