Cold and hungry, I shivered on the platform.

I lowered my head and pressed my hand against “The Star of David,” sewed onto my fraying coat.

From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher

The suicide stopped drowning for a minute to pose for the art students sketching on the riverbank. It happened about the time Sartre claimed he was being followed through the streets of Paris by a pair of rare blue lobsters. The bearded lady sat at the window, beautiful in her own way, but struggling to decide whether or not she should start to shave. Even though Hitler was dead, the screams from the gas chambers went on. People in the surrounding area would later say they thought it was just the collection of apple-cheeked Hummel figurines above the fake fireplace.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author of The Death Row Shuffle, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. He co-edits the online journals Unbroken and UnLost.

I stretch my legs inhaling and exhaling. It’s a beautiful abundant sunshiny day, and I’m ready for my jog. Not many people are out and that’s normal nowadays.

Since jogging, my legs have strengthened and I’m more energetic. I’ve been working from home and cooking more, but I miss the previous world. However, I won’t let Covid-19 take away my jogging.

From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher

Even though the sign says, “Do not swim near seals,” we’ll have fun, go on a picnic in the hills, maybe spend the whole night there, so many stars that the sky looks perforated by cosmic buckshot, or we’ll sleep in and then helicopter over traffic jams, moving, breathing, shining from rehab center to wedding cake palace, while the angel of death rolls a cigarette and the border wall sinks another quarter of an inch, and this will happen again and again and again, people turning up at all hours to complain bitterly about being written out of our story.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author most recently of Stick Figure Opera: 99 100-word Prose Poems from Cajun Mutt Press.

Poof went my idea for a poem, off it charged into the common air. It could be anywhere on this train now, traveling up the coast. Maybe people are talking about it in the dining car, maybe the conductor’s thinking about it as he takes their order for dinner. It could be in the heart of the young marine from Camp Pendleton, a lieutenant, stationed there for three years. He’s on his way to San Francisco to see his girlfriend. He has something important to tell her, something that just came to him, while the sun set over the Pacific.

From Guest Contributor Linda Lowe

Linda’s stories and poems have appeared in Outlook Springs, Crack the Spine, New Verse News, Star 82 Review, Indolent Books, A Story in 100 Words, and others.

We were invited to a silent room filled with melting glaciers. I just stood there, part of the system, but vulnerable in a way peculiar to men who are naked except for their socks and shoes. I’m constantly creating problems that never even existed. I have to walk really, really carefully or there’ll be more cats than people around. After we’re dead, it’s another story: Cosimo de Medici once complained to Michelangelo, “That sculpture doesn’t look like me.” “Listen,” Michelangelo said, “you’ll be dead in 20 years, this will be around for 2,000 years. So, that’s what you look like!”

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author most recently of Spooky Action at a Distance from Analog Submission Press.

The gentle ripple of the waves soothes me, as I listen to the seagulls flying above searching for prey. A mother is helping her young son build a sandcastle while keeping an eye out for her daughter. “Don’t go too far out,” she bellows.

The ocean is a world of its own, and the world is the ocean.

From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher

As a child, Jaime loved the subway. No car seats. Strange people. Traveling underground in a long tunnel. She couldn’t wait to be old enough to ride into the city on her own.

Jaime sits. It’s not the grossest thing she’s witnessed on the New York City subway.

There was a guillotine in the basement. People in the surrounding buildings reacted by hurling rocks and bottles. The whole thing felt suspicious, like someone was trying to send me a message. So I started cutting out images of crashes and mass shootings from the newspaper and transferring them onto the surface of prison-issued soaps. Then I figured out a way to do that onto the prison sheets. The residue that accumulated on the floor and walls took on a life of its own. Now what do we do? The window provides enough natural light to keep the snake alive.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Gordon hated being measured. It wasn’t just the crinkled-paper hands running over his body, but also the implication that in the intervening months he had changed shape.

Let the old man fondle his buttocks, and the common folk stare at his unconventional wardrobe. He was one of the few people in the world that could claim he was truly one of a kind.