For the 2021 Arts Issue, Little Village asked local artists to “build a utopia” through a one- or two-page comic.

Lauren Haldeman is the author of ‘Instead of Dying’ (winner of the 2017 Colorado Prize for Poetry), ‘Calenday’ and ‘The Eccentricity is Zero.’ A graphic novelist and poet, she has received an Iowa Arts Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award and fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. This art was originally published in Little Village issue 290.