When Cupid Calls

They laugh their boisterous laughs, holding hands with Pride seated in the gaps between their knuckles. Butterflies overflow their love-struck hearts and they try their best not to erupt in a bashful fit of giggles. He looks at her like she is all the world's treasures in one. And she looks at him like he’s everything her heart has ever yearned for.

Then they leave the room, white with Shame, hands still clumsily interlocked. But with preening eyes, tugging hearts and Cupid calling them away to the gaze of their secret lovers.

Oh, how first love always ends in regret.

From Guest Contributor Mahathi Sathish

Unsolved Mysteries #2

The unbalanced hostage-taker suddenly meekly surrendered to his Jewish hostages. A delegation of angels in a tree outside the synagogue hooted in derision and then rose into the sky and flapped away, leaving mysterious future gaps in the fossil record. In that instant, I became convinced of the essential stupidity of strictly adhering to any particular plan. And don’t think I didn’t know that, with my droopy face and drab old clothes, I looked like an unassimilable immigrant from a strange country – someplace dark and rainy and governed by contradiction, where there are no clues or, rather, only false ones.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author of Failed Haiku, a poetry collection that is the co-winner of the 2021 Grey Book Press Chapbook Contest and scheduled for publication in summer 2022.