You stared out at our radiant world with an intense, even belligerent, expression. A ratty top hat, at least half a size too small, sat on your head at a treacherous angle. Your gaunt, wrinkled cheeks might have come from having lived on the street or being tortured in some foreign jail for political crimes, but didn’t. These were the years you renamed yourself, smoked a white clay pipe, worked in a carnival of night sweats and empty thought bubbles. Sometimes the stock market cratered. Other times you just wished we each could experience the irony of posthumous cult status.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author of What It Is and How to Use It (2019) from Grey Book Press, among other poetry collections.

It’s like a post-apocalyptic movie. A usually bustling city is eerily vacant. Essential supplies have come to include liquor, guns, and toilet paper. Who isn’t secretly embarrassed? Around midnight I take a puzzle apart just for the hell of it. The next morning my department holds a Zoom session on how to prevent cheating in online classes. Other professors mention they also have been having strange dreams. In mine, I’m eating Crown Fried Chicken on a bench while eyeballs the size of boulders roll across the grass and dirt, and a woman I recognize from TV weeps into her hands.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie Good is the author of What It Is and How to Use It (2019) from Grey Book Press, among other poetry collections.

Brian stared at the devastation. Where once stood his immaculately kept garage, packed with 45-years worth of careful philatelic curation, was a skeletal frame and mound of black cinders. His eye would be diverted by what momentarily struck him as an envelope floating on the breeze, but turned out was nothing but ash.

His wife attempted consoling him. Imagine the insurance payout! But his devotion had never been about money. Only now, staring at the remains of his life’s work, did he truly understand his need for the comfort of a well-aligned stamp in a world of chaos and entropy.

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

Brigit, Irish Goddess of Poetry, sits at the feet of her Mother of Plenty.

Mother says, “I pray they find peace and joy in our plentiful gifts before destroying them.”

From Guest Contributor Soma Datta (@somaxdatta)

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

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.

As he nailed the boards over his windows one by one, each pounding of the hammer reinforced his decision. The world was about to die.

The sad part about reality is there can never been any ironclad certainty. Civilization was coming apart at the seams, an obvious fact if you just looked around. But people said he was crazy and chose to ignore all the warning signs.

He felt sorry for them. They had fallen under the mass delusion, and they would not be prepared for the end times. Perhaps his pity would be some solace as they all burned.

“O ugly ducklings grown into beauty, are ye homesick too?”

Thus I, standing in the shadows of the House of Quasimodo, watching you glide upon these placid waters, O snow-winged sisters of my soul!

“Swans fly south for the winter” You, of whom I first read in the sun-baked plains of my homeland, a world soaked in the scents of masala and mangoes – in this city of eternal Autumn, you have made yourselves a second Spring.

You know not my home, O Daughters of Winter. I know not yours. Yet here the twain shall meet, Once Upon a September.

From Guest Contributor Hibah Shabkhez

Hibah is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic language-learning enthusiast, a teacher of French as a foreign language and a happily eccentric blogger from Lahore, Pakistan. Studying life, languages and literature from a comparative perspective across linguistic and cultural boundaries holds a particular fascination for her.

A new year. Time to make new, exciting changes.

Shall I spend more time writing, or perhaps make time to relax with a cup of coffee next to the warmth of the fireplace with a good book. I could clean out the basement and get rid of old Christmas ornaments I never use. How about jogging or enrolling in a paint class. Joining a book club could be fun. I would love to discuss “To Kill A Mockingbird.” Skydiving, snorkeling, traveling the world. Maybe.

Or maybe this is all wishful thinking, since I only have a short time to
live.

From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher