Samantha Jade Remigio

“I am not an essential worker. I should be more scared for them, I tell myself. They could bring the virus back home. My mother has asthma. But I don’t feel a thing. The world does not seem real to me anymore.”

David Groff

“Inching closer to death with no notes to show for it.”

Stewart Sinclair

The circumstances under which Memorial Day falls this year have brought me back to the same conclusions drawn by Kurt Vonnegut. “We are here, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.”

Kay Bell

Beyond the window

where the water brings

the handsome things

a song overrides the wreck

I listen

Hayden Corwin

“I had to tell my mother that graduation wasn’t going to happen. She cried over the phone.”

Dana Gainey

Now I’m here, and I like who I am here, but I find my current position, and this current state of affairs, as unconscionable, if not criminal.

Henny Neustadt

I wish I could accept my own advice. In times of silence all I do is worry, worry, worry, wonder when the next time will come that I can set aside to worry. I should start to put it into my schedule.

Nick Vidal

My mom enters the living room and finds me self-loathing on the couch. She can read my thoughts on my face. She stands there smiling until I finally look up and notice her. “Figure it out,” she says, and exits laughing.

Megan Malibiran

Now I fell far from worldly things and

Appreciate the lifeless wall instead

Kimberlee Mix

I am holding office hours for my class, a chance to say good-bye and swap smiles one last time. At the end of the Zoom link sits a virtual space I have curated with everything that fills the screen. My real office door is closed and for these next two hours I will be present.

Gabriel Noel

“This image of terror, and the thoughts of terror that circled it, brought back to me the conviction that here I was witnessing another manifestation of the tragedy of the United States.”

Melissa Frias

“you noticed that guy in your class just stopped joining the zoom calls that one week death tolls were really high, but your professor still calls his name when he takes attendance…”

Arpa Hacopian

I’m in my room in the Financial District, far from nature, far from the countryside, far from my home in Armenia. I feel homesick. Normally, being far from home on your first visit to New York would mean forgetting that homesickness. But this isn’t “normal.”

Maryse Sepeynith

Kids screaming outside the window

Playing and running,

Desires of outside, the sun, the birds

Alejandro D. Orengo Colón

In the middle of a pandemic, a filmmaker offers a video from a time when it was possible to cross oceans on journeys to forget.

Salar Abdoh

“Rather than peace, I lived war.”

C. Adán Cabrera

for my grandmother, who crossed deserts with naked feet and who once challenged the moon to a shouting match.

Hedayat Reda

“If I have to arrange another Zoom call, I’ll murder someone.”

Alexa Dayoan

A reflection on the real and imagined worlds in which we currently find ourselves confined. Together.

H.E. Fisher

i hold my breath

as if there is volume to spare