5×5 board hand-drawn at the dinner table
On the back of a restaurant postcard
The free space is the war in Ukraine
Ending in the wrong direction.
The remaining 24 squares we divide into 3 categories:
Communal, national, global.

Communal is the most chipper:
Sadie gets great sex, but also a UTI
Hospital clogs get big in Brooklyn
A mutual friend goes bald
Hopefully by choice.

National is tough to bear, but easy to predict:
No one wants to hear the National Guard is going to be called in again
They boo, I threaten martial law
They acquiesce.

Joe Biden confesses to his preferred form of dementia
There is another outbreak of something roughly the scale of the swine flu
Someone wants to specify mad-cow disease, but I’m holding the pen
And as Pontius Pilate said, what I have written, I have written.

Global is the most speculative fiction:
In efforts to get specific, we consent to guesswork
Another Donald Trump protégé rises below the Equator?
We formally enter a second Cold War?
Russia gets evicted from the UN?

When we have 8 of each and are nearly satisfied, we take a picture
I put the postcard in my purse, and we all promise
To pay our best attention to current events
To keep a close tally over the next 12 months
And take a shot of some foul liquid
Anytime our nightmares come true.

Ivy Scott is an Afro-Caribbean poet and writer who currently lives in New York. She is a 2026 Periplus fellow in poetry, a Cave Canem spring workshop participant, and was recently named a finalist for the Brooklyn Poets fellowship. Her newest work meditates on ideas of disaster, faith and diaspora and is published or forthcoming in Mosaic and Obsidian Lit magazines. She is left-handed and softly bilingual.