by Eric Hayward
Probably all of us have these
I can’t see your skull but I’m pretty sure
there’s a space for the end of the world
built into every human brain, and
of course it opens up wider every night
when all the vessels vasodilate
to shepherd in the floods of bloods
This dream was about the Pope
getting sucked into a sudden
swirling sinkhole in
the center of the sea
The next morning I woke up at 5
to beat the toilet paper lines
and gather my family
to plan for catastrophe
Eric Hayward is a professional health care writer and acupuncturist. Like many, he was swept along last April by an early wave of worldwide layoffs. He has since landed upright again, and looking back over the past year’s writings, was surprised by how many of his normally non-topical poems were touched off by the pandemic. Eric writes fiction and poetry from his adopted home in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, where he lives shoulder-to-shoulder with his wife, teenaged children, and a normally out-of-state college student, all of them working and studying from home. Sally Lelong is a visual storyteller working in a variety of media that lend themselves to use in a conceptual framework. She lives and works in New York, and routinely exhibits her work in a variety of settings from print to thematic installations to street art.
Global Poemic 