Six feet apart from my shoes.
—Ashly Cabral Arno

Eating to live; oops, the opposite!
—Vanina Bousquet

A bad time for lipstick lovers.
—Francis Almonte

You can smile with your eyes.
—Oleksandra Dalaya

Applaud each other from a distance.
—Ayumi Ota

Nonstop numbers, sky window, 7:00 p.m. cheers.
—Limin Yang

Pajamas, pajamas are an everyday outfit.
—Hui-Yu (Iris) Kao

Long scary winter, post-virus lifestyle.
—Barbara Guardigli

Impeachment, Covid, lockdown, election, citizenship, vaccine.
—Oleksandra Dalaya

Planned many things, Covid broke everything.
—Yuci Jhuo

Winter, spring, summer from the window.
—Hui-Yu (Iris) Kao

Social distancing = taking my humanity away.
—Juan Carlos Villalta Recinos

The “city that never sleeps” sleeps.
—Paula Robayo Torres

Looking great! From the waist up.
—Robin Poley

*
In September 2020, The New York Times published “The Pandemic in Six-Word Memoirs: ‘The world has never felt smaller,’” curated and edited by Larry Rivers and inspired by the six-word short story attributed to Ernest Hemingway: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Together, as Rivers writes, these micro-memoirs “make sense of this moment in history.”
*
*

Robin Poley’s students at The New York Public Library’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library hail from across the globe: Francis Almonte: Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic; Vanina Bousquet: Paris, France; Ashly Cabral Arno: Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; Oleksandra Dalaya: Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine; Barbara Guardigli: Forlì, Italy; Hui-Yu (Iris) Kao: Tainan, Taiwan; Yuci Jhuo: Taichung, Taiwan; Ayumi Ota: Osaka, Japan; Paula Robayo Torres: Bogotá, Colombia; Juan Carlos Villalta Recinos: Santa Ana, El Salvador; Limin Yang: Shanghai, China.