Robert Miltner’s literary nonfiction and lyrical essays have appeared in Los Angeles Review, Diagram, Great Lakes Review, Pithead Chapel, Juxtaprose, Kestrel, Del Sol Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review, as well as Eastern Iowa Review, and has been nominated for a Best of the Net and a Pushcart prize in nonfiction. His books of prose poetry are Hotel Utopia (New Rivers Press, 2011) and Orpheus & Echo (Etruscan Press, forthcoming in 2020) and his collection of short fiction is And Your Bird Can Sing (Bottom Dog Press, 2014). A professor emeritus of English at Kent State University Stark and the Northeast Ohio MFA in Creative Writing, he edits the Raymond Carver Review. For more related work, visit http://www.portyonderpress.com/robert-miltner---narrow-roads-north-nine-haibun.html
Worn wooden bench seats warmed by summer afternoon heat. Platform with scuffed yellow safety lines. Small shade from the platform roof forming a dark rectangle parallel to the mountains of the Cinque Terre on one side, the Mediterranean Sea on the other. The long wait. Train tracks, two, each north-south. Each entering or exiting a tunnel. Fences separate railway travelers… Read more →
Church bells ring, their metallic tone resonating through Corniglia, Italy. Thrushes form a chorus soon accompanied by unseen warblers. A car on the winding narrow road below slows, changes gears, accelerates up the incline. A roosters crows. One crow, two caws. Seagulls screech. The Hotel Cecio cleaves and clutches its high perch in the rocky terrain. The morning wind increases,… Read more →
Airport. Full moon. Pre-dawn. Travelers arrive as a flock then disperse singular, paired, in families of three, four. They sit in rows, static as seagulls in a parking lot. Fingers picking at cellphones that chirp like tree frogs. Boarding calls from the ceiling tin the air. The flock reconfigures in a sleight of hand, gather like starlings. They pool, curve,… Read more →