Stand By Your Mail

03/29/2026

03/21/2026

To the High School Couple in Line at the
Ice Cream Parlor,

You look smitten. Or rather, your foreheads and eyes do. I can’t tell how your noses and mouths feel about the relationship because of your masks.

Soon, you’ll select your flavors and sit down over 1m apart. There will be Xs taped on the bench, the government’s way of enforcing social distancing. You’ll watch each other remove your masks and lick your ice cream cones. You will not touch in the shop. But then you will leave, and you’ll grab hands and wander up the hill to the MRT station, through the muggy air of another Friday night in Singapore.

-Ginny Fahs

03/21/2026

03/21/2026

  .official @post_office_facts      .paws .barrie   .[email protected]  .paws

03/06/2026

To the Afternoon Rollerbladers,

Thirteen-year-olds in shoes with pink wheels:
I know you. I remember summers that stretched on for years and too-late twilights and still wishing we had more time in the day to play. I remember the feeling that summer might go on forever, and what a dream that would be, what a distant nightmare “school” was.

Im back in the neighborhood now-back in the house l’d come to refer to as my parents’ place-dreaming about fall, about early sunsets on a reopened world, about the end of staying home.

You zoom past me on the sidewalk and I can’t help but wish I still longed for endless summer, for the days | was content to go nowhere at all, so long as went very fast.

-Kristina Cuello

03/05/2026

Musk wants to take OUR post office to sell it off to his billionaire buddies, leaving us with worse service and higher costs!

Add your name to the petition to tell 47 to keep his hands off the post office by commenting “SaveUSPS” (one word, no spaces) or by going to our bio:

MoveOn.org/HandsOffUSPS

03/05/2026

To the Drummer Who Lives Down the Hill,

Your seasonal backyard pow-wows used to crowd the main road with dusty pick-ups and fill the air with chants and beats. But now l hear you daily: morning, noon, sunset. On social media, newcomers to the neighborhood complain: What’s that drumming? Old timers reply: It*s for us. Shush. We are lucky to have him. The drumming will help keep us safe.

I read that people in the cities bang pots and pans every night at seven. Here, in the foot-hills, in this canyon, under the ancient oaks, we have you and your drum.

-Lisa Alvarez

Off Assignment, 2020

03/05/2026

Tahoe Vista, California

03/05/2026

To the Small-Time Virus that Broke Into Quarantine,

You were, on the larger scale of things, a blip, not the visitor we feared or expected.

But you broke in and I respect your tenacity. You arrived on day 30 of our isolation. We had seen no one, been nowhere. My mother was explaining how the cedar waxwings get drunk on Juniper berries. My daughter was singing to the potted azalea. And then her stomach hurt.

And then came a fever. We all held our breath for two days. And then you left.

Tell me: how did you get in? A package? A car door? All surfaces seem sinister. I shudder, now, thinking about elevator buttons.

-Lauren Hilgers