It will happen, we’re sure of it now,
despite our best wishes for happy returns

scribbled on recycled cards. Toilets and bathtubs
will litter the rock-fields, arrows of runways

vanish to blue. Everything suddenly a nest
or a shelter, none of it for us.

A woman did warn us, her own time close.
Hold fast, she said, devour and swallow,

say you feel full, the joke’s still on you
who had the fun of it. Everything’s up for grabs

and the grabbers are coming over the hill.
The esplanade you strolled hand in hand,

the babies you watched as they slept,
all that you locked in boxes under the bed.

This splinter of prescience needling
the skin of my easy morning.

How small the pain, how sharp.

Elizabeth Loudon is a poet and novelist living in a market town in southwest England. Her debut novel A Stranger In Baghdad (AUC Hoopoe) was published in 2023 and her poetry appears in journals including Trampset, One Art, Blue Mountain Review, and Southword. When not writing, she and the dog spend as much time as possible outside.

Ronny Quevedo (b. 1981, Guayaquil, Ecuador) works in a variety of mediums including sculpture and drawing. He received his MFA from Yale University and BFA from Cooper Union. Quevedo's work was been exhibited at the Denver Art Museum; the Albright Knox Gallery; Foxy Productions; Upfor Gallery; James Fuentes Gallery; the Whitney Museum of American Art; Socrates Sculpture Park and the Queens Museum. Solo presentations include Silueta, Rubber Factory and no hay medio tiempo / there is no halftime, Queens Museum. Group exhibitions include Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art at the Whitney Museum and the traveling exhibition Monarchs: Brown and Native Contemporary Artists in the Path of the Butterfly. His work has been reviewed in Art Forum and Hyperallergic. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Denver Art Museum and other world-renowned cultural institutions. His work is highlighted in Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, Politics by Arlene Davila. Quevedo is a recipient of a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship and A Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art. He has held residencies at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Project Row Houses and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture.