We hugged our children when they stepped off the bus, but they looked at us with vacant eyes, and when they spoke, the music was missing. They didn’t know who we were, or what they were doing on this street where they’d grown up. We brought out the brownies they loved, but they said no, our precious fifth graders, and stacked their suitcases up like a funeral pyre, as if to set fire to their childhood. The bus driver stood on the corner, a new god, calling them back to their new life, while we were left to wave goodbye.

From Guest Contributor Linda Lowe

Walking down the street, he stops and listens. There’s so much going on around him that he has trouble making out any specific sound on its own. The cacophony of everything around him is almost deafening. People are talking on the phone. Cars are racing down the street, honking. There’s a poor musician playing for tips. He can’t stand any of it. The sound of people shuffling around him is the worst of it, he thinks. All his life, the only thing he’s wanted was silence. He hears a whistle, then a boom, and then after that he hears nothing.

From Guest Contributor Chris Ellsworth

I open the window with force to see what the commotion is. The street is filled with people standing and screaming. I see a glimpse of a shoeless foot, sock hanging. Long red hair catches my eyes, as does the smashed front windshield of a small car.

I coddle the furry cat in my arms, and realize I’ll be his home now.

From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher

Frank stumbles down the street in broad daylight. The crisp air helps dull the pain in his wounds. Lightheaded and off balance, he is reminded of late nights in college, wandering drunkenly back to his dorm room. His vision now has the same tunnel focus that causes him to lose sight of his surroundings.

What a weird thing to remember as he is about to die.

A college-age girl collecting money – no doubt for a worthy cause – rings the doorbell, sending our little white dog into a barking frenzy. Sorry, I tell her after kicking aside the dog to get to the door, but we gave last week. She doesn’t believe me. I can read it in the sudden hardening of her face. If anything, she’s probably thinking it’s necessary sometimes to kill what is in order to bring about what is not. I start to shut the door and then stop and glance up the street. The falling leaves die saying, I want to go.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie Good’s latest poetry book is The Horse Were Beautiful (2022), available from Grey Book Press. Redhawk Publications is publishing his collection, Swimming in Oblivion: New and Selected Poems, later this year.

When the sun finally set that evening, it was as if someone was turning off a faucet. The water ran clear and cold, then stopped running altogether, leaving behind a long, jagged-edged stain on the pavement that slowly grew into a pool of blood on the street below, like a wound left open too long, growing wider.

Clouds pressed down hard against the earth while the sky darkened. The townspeople began dying in great numbers. The river never once turned red with the blood that flowed through its banks. Nothing could change the truth of who and what I’d become.

From Guest Contributor J. Iner Souster

All below was sky. No, that isn’t right. You are upside down. The seatbelt keeps you suspended a foot above ground. Blood swells and pounds in your temples, or was it the whiskey? Frank was on the street.

A wailing siren approaches.

From Guest Contributor Kyle J. Ames

Kyle is a student of English at Pikes Peak Community College

Nighttime, people strode past him in pursuit of merriment at the city’s main square.

Someone would throw him an empanada. He sometimes found one, after footsteps scurried away.

From Guest Contributor Krystyna Fedosejevs

Krystyna writes poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction regardless of the season, although she prefers spring.

The pills I take at night to get to sleep leave me feeling dazed all morning. I stare stupidly at the white screen of my laptop while rubbing my head in a forlorn attempt to stimulate the language center of the brain. I think once again of Bruno Schulz. Only the first sentence of the novel he was writing when he was murdered survives: Mother awakened me in the morning, saying, “Joseph, the Messiah is near…” A Gestapo officer shot him down in the street in broad daylight. It was a kind of hobby, to be honest.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author most recently of the poetry collections Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing) and Famous Long Ago (Laughing Ronin Press).

A stranger walked up to me on the street and said with a quaver, “I am completely overwhelmed.” He was wearing a black raincoat that reached down below his knees. Wait, I thought, it’s not raining. When we’re dead, it’ll be a whole different story. Cosimo de Medici once complained to Michelangelo, “That sculpture doesn’t look like me.” “Listen,” Michelangelo told him, “you’ll be dead in 20 years, this will be around for 2,000 years. So that’s what you look like!” And now, even though it’s nighttime all over the world, there are pictures on fridges and music in elevators.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author of more than a dozen poetry collections, including most recently Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing) and The Bad News First (Kung Fu Treachery Press).