The Book of Hope | Dustin Pickering

- Dustin Pickering

winsome crux of beauty,

the silence preps into day,

a cold curmudgeon of sacrificial bout,

the nastiness of tomorrow.



an imbecilic angst hovering

above the moon's stairway,

thought's random circumcision

of defeat,



an eternal blackness of time.

Dustin Pickering is the founder of Transcendent Zero Press. He has contributed writing to Huffington Post, Café Dissensus Everyday, The Statesman (India), Journal of Liberty and International Affairs, The Colorado Review, World Literature Today, and several other publications. He placed in the top 100 out of 12,500 entries for the Erbacce Prize in 2021 and was a finalist in Adelaide Literary Journal’s first short fiction contest. He was longlisted for the Rahim Karim World Prize in 2022 and given the honour of Knight of World Peace by the World Institute for Peace that same year. He hosts the popular interview series World Inkers Network on YouTube.