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I’ve always been sitting at this kitchen table, even when I haven’t. My life: ash from a cigarette, swirl of torn paper. His name was… . He wore a cap pulled to his eyebrows. He said… and blink, there’s music playing over the static, chips of song with only half the words. (The trees are thickening, buds visible as a fog clinging to the branches.) I hold on to the idea of his hand, his cream-slicked hair falling forward, his leather jacket, if he had one, his smooth uncertain lips. My own hand cautious on the concrete wall by the church, my hand thinking in its stolid way that the wall was warm, my bookbag heavy, my eyes taking in the sky (always blue in memories of childhood), my glasses, if I had glasses, sliding down my nose, my head starting to fill with a thought that would later turn to ash, to paper. I am already forgetting this table, its woodenness, its grain, the jam stain that has lasted so long it’s an heirloom. The table is a prop in the play I’m staging for my twilight years. The air is filled with dust that glows and rises with the memory birds, smudged as they are, and torn, parts of a puzzle I can’t solve or forget. His name began with an F.

My father is buried where crows can watch over they rattle and grate to the sky. They stand triangular in the sharp pinyon pines: they don’t know how long they’ll stay. I want to speak how the crows do, clear as uncoiled rain, forged bright as ten-penny nails, agile to cut through any distance. My father loved their rawness. His spirit reaches out to me across the trees. Today a trapezoid-winged crow falls on the pale aspen by the old steel mill, at the highway and orange grove crossroad. My dad threw steel beams into that foundry for a time. He flashed bright in the kiln. The sky is sluiced into faded gold, as the sun strays. Now he is ash, and crow, and swift feathers tossed to the pines. I walk in water, the swirling tide I walk in water, the swirling tide pulls, combs the fingers of smoke into dires of want. Sky blues into move and sun note lies, casts the open into a vast net of finds. The deer travel and leave, skull and bone under full moon rise, whitened by time. I told you it didn’t have to happen, yet you showed me what you thought was enough: a deer on the patio makes itself the only wise thing. How do you surmise the new direction? The sun dives over thick waves, weaves through foam. The eyes see grey in the antlers of morning as the lyre guards the stones, produces lost thoughts, sutured and gone, like rocks too far out to sea. Instructions for cloudy wing I dream about walking the ridges, the pinking finches right near the top. Clouds sweep blossoms to wind cliffs. I remember you talking of switchbacks on the grapevine, bowing across mute shale like a phantom in a lost world, an imaginative scarring moment of change and regret. Speaking of regret I like how it rhymes with egret, a waterbird who lives in the line between final and sky, the wings freed at right angles. As I go up, I feel the beak of it pressing the air back further and then I have the flight, the lift, to hit the ridge, beautiful and bereft of goldenrod and bluebells, but the seeds still scatter the way the pinned hawk claims the sky with its own searing, its knuckled fist, it’s another way to be night. Reading the sky and wings, when the moon buries the dark below the cairn, I touch edges with wind and sky, still burning, all I need is to cry the egrets, cloudy wings holding sky. It’s another thing I watch for you, who might wander by any minute, and yet if you don’t, I’ll move on, because that’s what I do. It’s another thing to know the sky reflects silver and the little gnats gnaw away at the edges uncounted, and the steps through the pines go to the next step. Why do we need to know where the path leads, there was nothing there before. It is a lot of time to catch a fish and to ferry a child in a boat across a sound and no one is there to see it, they say the locusts can even hear undertones in the grass. Lynn Finger’s (she/her) works have appeared in 8Poems, Book of Matches, Fairy Piece, Drunk Monkeys, and ONE ART: a journal of poetry. Lynn also recently released a poetry chapbook, “The Truth of Blue Horses,” published by Alien Buddha Press. Lynn edits Harpy Hybrid Review, and her Twitter is @sweetfirefly2.

I held your hand when the Rigor mortis set in You were firm with me that day And my heart was soft and malleable As it slipped through your fingers like Sand Your bones felt like they were trying to escape When your mouth pulled back over your teeth Perhaps a smile Perhaps to laugh at me Like eyes rolling in a skull at something silly I’d said Again Why do I do that? But words are pointless now Just like hearing them Because nothing said is nothing gained Or ventured perhaps Or ever at least for you Because I walk away now Because it’s done Amy-Jean Muller is an artist, writer, and poet from South Africa who lives and works in London. Both her art and writing explore culture, memory, mental health, identity, femininity, and sexuality. She has worked as an indie poetry EIC for Outcast Press, with regular contributions to Versification and The Daily Drunk. Her debut poetry collection, Baptism by Fire, was released in January 2021. The work is beautifully introduced by Stoya, Pornographer and author of Philosophy, Pussycats, & Porn who noted, ‘An angry woman remains a political act, and is sometimes a creative one as well. Rage, here, is transcended into art…” Muller is currently completing her first novel and a second poetry collection slated for release in 2024. | amyjeanmuller.com | Twitter: @muller_aj

Coaster. It’s faded somewhat, but something about it has always caught my eye. The grey skyline and traffic, against brown marshland and skeletons of bare winter trees, beneath Suffolk’s Orwell Bridge - taken nineteen eighty something. I think about those people in the cars, the lives they led after, the greying, the decaying what love may have passed through and the ironic nature in which life eventually pans out. And how unknowingly years on, their journey still remains frozen in time on a coaster - beneath a reduced to clear can of 7-UP. Neon Summer Rain. *For Mark Anthony Pearce. We take pictures, as others run for cover. Smeared purples, whites and pinks reflect in the puddles, while the overflowing drains spread the canvases across the road. A waterfall cascades down the steps, with illuminated baby blue droplets from the underpass, like some late night concrete waterpark. And even in the reflections of flickering neon corporate logos - some magic is found amongst the lost dreams and rain soaked tents that some people call home, down in Bristol’s Bear Pit. Gwil James Thomas is a poet, novelist and inept musician. He lives in his home town of Bristol England, but has also lived in London, Brighton and Spain. He has been nominated for Best of The Net twice and once for The Pushcart Prize. His twelfth chapbook of poetry Wild River Carry me To Sea is forthcoming from Back Room Poetry. His poems have recently featured in Viper’s Tongue, The Songs From The Underground anthology, DFL Lit, Paper & Ink and Late Britain Zine. He plans to one day build a house, amongst other things.

About three years ago, I began to take showers in the dark. In part to wash away the grime and filth of the day, but also to feel something that I lost. I would clamber into my windowless room of tile and steel, and lay my towel along the seams of the door; stopping any light that might spoil the dark. I bared myself, stripping away layer after layer, each casted cloth a moment for memory. All would be sequestered in the corner of the room. The desire to reside anywhere but in myself would overtake me. I would open the curtain; a swift cold urging my hair to full posture. Clinging to the valve, I would turn it to red, as hot as I could bear it. In the windowless room, I was in a state of prescripted blindness. I could not see in front of me, but I knew the room well. I knew the seams on the floor tiles, I knew the sound of thundering water as it collided with the ceramic. I did not need to see. I did not want to. I would feel the abrasive water relax me like a drumline massage. It was loud and rapid, but soothing. My eyes were open, because why should I close them? I was already consumed in the darkness. Slowly, I would slip away from thought, stress, and anxiety. Until there was only heat, feeling, and reflection. Heat A few summers earlier, as we rowed down the dirty, girl-scout-green Erie Canal, my crew mates Ian and Christian were chirping along to Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al”. A few of the other boys and I had grown tired of the tune, as it had played for at least an hour every day thus far on our journey. We had been rowing all afternoon, and in fact for the last five days, in a rowing shell for four rowers; forty-four feet of black carbon fiber absorbing all of the sun’s rays. We were to be in Albany in five days, sweating and swearing our way along the canal. I was the youngest on the crew at the age of 16, and whether I would admit it then or not, I looked up to many of the boys I rowed with. Ian, Joey, Sean, Alex, Mike, and Christian. Christian is a man best defined as a free spirit trapped in a box. Whether it was a boat or a necktie, Christian’s wild soul found itself bound in some way. His messy crop of white-blond hair dangling in front of two bright blue eyes, intelligent and mischievous. As high school boys trapped in a boat together for eight hours a day… for ten days, you can imagine the kind of cooperation it took to get through it all. It was the kind of cooperation that would make any normal person turn off a song after the third, fifth, or even twelfth request. This mindset didn’t stick much for Christian, though. He would play the song until I had memorized every note of that peppy tin flute solo. Most of our nights were spent in pitched tents on the side of the snaking canal, or the gnarled gravel of rusted marinas. We weren’t just rowing three hundred and forty miles on a whim or even the goodness of our hearts; it was mandatory, backbreaking charity work. Our act of community service, the ‘Row for Hope’ was a tradition amongst my high school’s rowing team, we simply were the next to take the mantle of Samaritans. Christian was always the kid to wander away from the eyes of coaches and teachers, inducing panicked thoughts of child abduction before inevitably returning with a token from his journey. One day on the row, Christian wandered from our campsite unbeknownst to the coaches and returned with a handful of warm pennies flattened smooth from a passing train. The throwaway change was transformed into a memory of locomotives, friends, and mischief. That same evening he returned from the woods with an armful of frogs, beaming at our worried coach. I reflect on this memory now with nothing but fondness, but at the time I remember hating his behavior. I was an extremely anxious kid growing up. I was often told I had the spirit of a 50 year old man, but in truth, I was bound by a fear; grappling with an undiagnosed anxiety and panic disorder. While Christian was communicating with wildlife, and molding metals, I was holding a lump of panic in my throat. What if he got lost? What if we stall too long and miss our next stop? What if we fail to follow the schedule and become the first boat to ever fail on the Row for Hope? I realize now how my doubts and anxieties often limited my appreciation of others. When I looked at Christian I saw chaos walking, a wildman restrained only by a necktie. I must emphasize the shallowness of this assessment. I never pulled Christian aside to ask him about his fears, to check if the lack of concern was an act. I never had the freedom or wisdom to. I was so self-absorbed by my own mental torment, dealing with my own mental backstabbing, that I wasn’t ready to extend my empathy. I wasn’t ready to be vulnerable for others because I felt so vulnerable within myself. That said, Christian’s personality did not encourage intimacy, at least not with me. We didn’t talk about each other's fears, desires, and other deep ideas; we talked about stupid shit, laughed at stupid shit, and got frustrated by other people’s stupid shit. For a time, I knew him best through the synchronized, snap, swish, flick, pull of our oars. In the more desperate heats of the summer, when the weather was a painful 90 degrees, Christian would square his oar and let a small splash of canal water hit me as we rowed on. On days of passing thunderstorms, we would beach the boat and run to shore to wait it out, dreading the game of catchup we would face once back in the shell. I would always be concerned Christian would wander off and hurt himself, get lost, or find something truly amazing. Though I hated the way I felt when he was enacting chaos, the suspense he brought wherever he went helped bond us all as brothers, not in blood, but in spirit. Christain’s disregard for scheduling and basic safety never ended in a poor outcome, he always came back with a memory. Each time we were forced to stray from our destined path we were reassured we could forge our own. Despite the begrudging attitude we maintained before the journey, it seemed all of us on the trip grew closer, in no small part thanks to Christian. Feeling Christian and I found our lives intertwined for a time, even after our experiences on the crew team. Junior year of highschool I joined the Rugby team, a team which Christian was an integral member of. Nervous, inexperienced, and tentative, I found myself attached to Christian as a source of familiarity in an environment entirely new to me. Christian taught me the rules of the sport: how to run, where to run, how to tackle, who to tackle. He taught me what emotions were useful and which were not in any particular moment. When the situation called for calm, he was quiet; when it called for fury, he was loud. He never denied pain, but neither did he indulge in it. He seemed to have a sort of balance. Christian was one of the smallest guys on the field each practice, playing the role of “scrum half”: a small, speedy runner whose job was to take the ball from a tackle, and throw it to the first receiver, which initiates each play. It was in this context I could see the wild side of Christian freed from the bonds of boats and neckties, as he sprinted from point A to point Z throwing the ball. Although small and speedy, Christian was not afraid to take on any giant that may oppose him. He voraciously attempted to tackle anyone who should cross his path. His passion rubbed off on me I suppose. Through the guidance of Christian, I became a determined, seasoned player. Although I was a decent rower, I found my true physical talent in Rugby. Christian was a senior the year I joined, so he did not see me become captain of the team the following year. There are many things I wish Christian had seen, many things I wish I had said. Although we were close, we never quite made the journey into deep emotional conversation. Perhaps it was the age gap or grade gap, or maybe there were other gaps I couldn’t see or dare venture, but the closest we came to emotional expression were the hugs we gave after each rugby match. Win or lose, we found ourselves in an embrace, an unconscious support transferred through flesh. When we found ourselves at the NY State Rugby Championships, playing one of our final matches of the season and one of the last matches with each other, we lost our first game, placing us in a competition for third. Despite the loss and the hopes abandoned, we hugged. Reflection Oftentimes we do not memorize what people say. Unlike what movies may have you believe, even if someone is important in your life you often can’t remember their most profound moments. My writing of this piece is impaired, because you don’t get to have flashbacks of dialogue where everything is serene and they know just what to say. You remember what the world wishes you to. You can’t force memory to be profound, it just is. I don’t remember Christian’s statements. I remember determined looks on his face, hugs we shared, things he did. I remember eyes filled with the copper shine of flattened pennies. I remember him tearing shirts apart with his teeth to make sleeveless crop-tops while rowing. I can remember sweat dangling from the tips of his wild blonde hair while he ran across the rugby field. I remember a feral smile on his face as he joked. I remember a tame smile as we greeted strangers at mass. I remember “You Can Call Me Al” and a perfectly memorized tin flute solo, of all fucking things. These things mean more than any great quote to me. I remember Christian. It has been three years since he was found dead of natural causes in his college room in Hong Kong on February 5, 2020. I didn’t know how to react when I was told. He was only 20 years old, two years younger than I am now. As is often the case, the emotions had hit me late, a cheap shot right as I was walking away. I cried in the hallway of my first dorm around a month after his death. I had thought I stopped thinking about it, but when my father added “Christian Memorial” to my calendar it started again. I felt a sort of revulsion to see him become another date in a book, a place in the calendar of “things to do”. When he died my emotional intellect was in its infancy, and unsure of how to move on I began to take showers in the dark, not simply to wash aways the grime and filth of the day but perhaps to feel something that was lost. I would take a deep breath, and try to let the loud waters relax me, let the darkness consume my thoughts, and let the heat hold me. Was this a regression to infancy, to feel naked, in the heat of the dark womb? I didn’t know how to remember Christian in the light of day, in the frantic halls of life. So I took showers in the dark. I didn’t realize that those moments, standing in my darkened shower, were the beginning of the hardest period of change in my life thus far. Almost immediately after Christian’s passing marked the beginning of COVID in a practical sense in my life. I was sent home much like many other students, but I became drug dependent as I attempted to cope with the instability of my life. This, combined with extreme anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, and an eating disorder radically affected my mental state and tested my resilience. For some time I lost sight of Christian and those feelings of mourning as I was dealing with my own demons. Again, I was consumed in my own backstabbing to empathize with others. As a result of all of that personal hardship, I have found myself. I brought myself out of my addiction cold turkey, examined and helped heal my own mental health. As an atheist I will admit that my logic based, hedonistic stoicism brought me unhappiness because I was out of balance. Now I have a newfound sense of balance with the world, and new ideas about how I should live my life. I used to think happiness was something to be acquired, but now I know it is something to be crafted. Happiness is not won, it is grown and tended to. I don’t take showers in the dark anymore, now I accept the pain that may come from light. I have finally learned the lesson I was to blind to adopt in highschool, that every moment of chaos is an opportunity to summon the order within us and forge a new path. I now know that my mindset is a tool that manufactures reality for my own consumption; that locking myself in the darkness does not cut me off from my pain, only from that which can aid the burden. I know now that Christian wasn’t a creature of chaos chained by a world of order, rather, he was a wild wind harnessed for flight. Kevin Reed is a singer/songwriter and 6th-grade English teacher from Rochester, NY. Kevin’s work has been presented at SUNY Geneseo’s ”Great Day” event from where he is a 2023 graduate. His debut EP “This Thing is a Bullet” is available on Spotify and Apple Music.

d.S. randoL (they/them) goes dancing on Friday nights sometimes. They fantasize about successfully harassing neighbors for games of ping-pong. You can find more of their work at SledgehammerLit, Punk Noir Magazine, or on Twitter @dSrandoL!

grandpa's riverboat comes to a halt— coconut plantation the welcome drums at Ọmambala -- fragrant blossoms the eternal-rose you gave never fades -- our slow dance quickens to a tango the courting couples elegantly cruise past us -- carved on the tree bark our names deeper in foreign native accent -- nwantiti active love potion— pure white swans entwine in hearts Christina Chin is a painter and haiku poet from Malaysia. She is a four-time recipient of top 100 in the mDAC Summit Contests, exhibited at the Palo Alto Art Center, California. 1st prize winner of the 34th Annual Cherry Blossom Sakura Festival 2020 Haiku Contest. 1st prize winner in the 8th Setouchi Matsuyama 2019 Photohaiku Contest. She has been published in numerous journals, multilingual journals, and anthologies, including Japan's prestigious monthly Haikukai Magazine. Uchechukwu Onyedikam is a Nigerian creative artist based in Lagos, Nigeria. His poems have appeared in Amsterdam Quarterly, Brittle Paper, Poetic Africa, Hood Communists, The Hooghly Review, and in print anthologies. Christina Chin and he have co-published Pouring Light on the Hills (2022)

After driving for many hours, Chloe and I step out of the car to approach the Grand Canyon. Both of us are smelly and stiff from the journey, but we forge ahead until we can see the view in all its golden glory. The early evening sun illuminates every crevice of the Canyon’s vast display. My eyes widen, hungry to chew over every last detail. “That’s it?” Chloe asks. I turn to her with a frown. “What do you mean?” “I thought it’d be…bigger.” I assume she’s joking, but she has a serious look on her face. “The Grand Canyon isn’t big enough for you?” I ask. “That’s so condescending,” she says. “All I was saying is that it’s smaller than I thought it’d be.” Chloe stomps away from me, towards a vista point that’s teeming with tourists. Her knee-high chunky boots make an exaggerated crunchy sound as they pound against the dry dirt. Her dyed-green hair bobs back and forth in a high ponytail. When she’s annoyed, she looks exactly like she did when she was a kid, even though she’s certain she’s a woman now. She can wear all the makeup and mini skirts she wants, she’ll still always be a kid to me. Part of me wants to run after her, but I know that will only provoke her further. I stay in place and let the Grand Canyon keep me company instead. I stare out at the layered rock and consider how many millions of years it took to transform into this marvel. Water steadily carved down its center and time sneakily deepened that divide. My entire existence is a blink of an eye in comparison. It makes all my problems feel silly and small. I hope Chloe is staring out at the canyon and feeling silly and small too. I stroll along the canyon’s edge admiring the fiery shades of red smoothly blended with the muted beige and gray. I study its many dips and shadows, emphasizing its untamed roughness. I admire all the people proudly posing for pictures together. As bad as human beings can be as a species, it’s sweet how sentimental we are. Once I reach the swarm of sightseers, a man approaches me. He’s wearing an Ohio State shirt with a matching fanny pack wrapped around his hips. “Excuse me, Miss? Could you take a picture of me and my family?” he asks. “Of course,” I say with a smile. The man hands me his phone and rushes over to his wife and children. They gather under his open arms in front of the majestic view. His wife nuzzles into him as she grips the shoulders of their two small sons. The boys stand in front of them obediently beaming with missing baby teeth. “Everyone say cheese!” his wife says. “CHEESE,” the boys shout. I click a few times and nod when I’m done. They unlink from each other and the husband runs back over to me. “Would you like us to take a photo of you?” he asks. “No thanks.” “Oh, sure you do!” his wife says, waving me over. I pause to scan the crowd. “Give me one minute. I need to find my sister first.” I hurry through the herd of holidaymakers in search of Chloe. I notice her hunching over the furthest tip of the fence gazing off into the distance. I’m not sure if she’s actually enjoying the view or if she’s pretending to so that I’ll leave her alone. I race over to her and tap her on the arm. “Come here for a second.” “Why?” she scoffs. “Just come.” I drag her by the wrist back to where the family is waiting. “How in the world did you convince your parents to let you do that to your hair?” the wife asks upon laying eyes on Chloe. “My parents are getting divorced, so they literally don’t care at all,” Chloe says. The wife bows her head in embarrassment. “I’m sorry to hear that.” I pull Chloe close to me as we model in front of Mother Nature. She doesn’t smile, but I decide not to bother her about it. The man squats down low and sticks out his behind to capture the picture from the perfect angle. I giggle once I see the photo. We’re trying so hard to act normal for the camera. We look ridiculous. “I hope everything works out for you two and your family,” the wife says, as we walk away. Chloe and I head back to the car in silence. We lock the doors and I blast the air conditioning. I reach into the back seat and grab two water bottles. I place one in her lap. She glugs down half a bottle and wipes her mouth with her t-shirt. “Hey, do you want to go?” she asks. “We just got here! We drove all day.” “Do you?” she repeats. I gaze directly into her green eyes to gauge her sincerity. She doesn’t blink. “Yeah,” I say with a shrug. “Let’s go.” Miranda Steinway is a writer based in California. Her writing has appeared in Ellipsis Zine, Across the Margin, Maudlin House, and Expat Press. She is currently working on a novel. Find her on mirandasteinway.com.

The rainfall at 4:30 am Early in the morning. Promised sleep is broken. Glory still intact in the rain. An old house, The roof that acts like a roof. It is proof that Beggars can't be choosers. Romance with words, Early morning sentences, Knowing about the day. No sun or moon visible In the 4:30 am rain. I don't watch the sky I am stranded myself, Robbed out of poetic intensity. I turn away from the part of the sky My world fits in a room, It is pouring outside, The rain always makes music When I start writing. I do it awfully quiet, So, I don't wake up the house Under the roof. Sushant Thapa (b.1993) serves as an assistant editor to Himalaya Diary, an online publishing platform. He lives in Biratnagar, Nepal. He holds an M.A. in English from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. His fourth book entitled "Love's Cradle" was published by World Inkers Printing and Publishing New York, and Dakar, Senegal recently.

Certain tropes are dead. Crumpled up like paper And discarded, fallen off the table, gathering dust In a corner of the room. For example, old poets Would wax lyrical looking at some farmers Throw their back as they dig into the Earth, But all I see is hard work and sun-beaten faces. There is no romance in that scene. It’s real. But then other tropes are like those same pieces of paper Discovered while cleaning the room, smoothed out, And added back to the book, like when I was on a walk The other day I heard a magpie chirp. It reminded me Of an old nursery rhyme. I took my earphones out And listened, really listened to the bird songs. I felt like I was living a poem. Sameen Shakya is a poet and writer based in Kathmandu, Nepal. His poems have been published in the following magazines: Havik, The Pittsburgher, WINK: Writers In The Know, Teach Writer, and W-Poesis.

The early October air in the south feels like molasses. But it’s one of the last outdoor festivals of the season, so I push through the throngs of people. The crowd chatter coats the parts of me the thick air missed. As I’m jostled along like a bottle of Coke on an assembly line, a bedazzled queen in platform heels reaches down to gift me with a tiny rainbow flag and a megawatt smile. “A queen can always spot another queen, hon.” My shoulders scrunch up to my ears, and a heat spreads from my neck to my cheeks. No one ever notices me. It feels good to be seen, especially by someone so colorful and sure of herself. She must be sure of herself to navigate the crowd and the asphalt in those platforms. Her confidence bursts from the tiny rainbow flag and through my arm as it shoots through the air and over my head. I join the crowd’s enthusiasm, wildly waving my flag. Still riding my newfound confidence through the massive crowd, I spot some news cameras. Candy apple red and cotton candy pink wigs bob over the heads of the plain-looking. A shrill voice cuts through the crowd and turns the already oppressive heat up a couple of notches. “For God so loved the world, he gave his only begotten Son! Don’t you want everlasting life?” My arm feels heavy. I slowly let it melt to the ground with my flag still in hand. The street preacher’s words shoot through the crowd and slam into my body, judging it. Was that his intent? The ever-shifting crowd moves me towards the cameras and the street preacher. He’s small boned and dressed in a wool suit. Sweat beads pop up on his brow and run down into his eyes. He squints and swipes at it with his scratchy sleeve. My bedazzled queen bends down towards the street preacher, long arms circling him in an embrace. I can see his shoulders let go and relax at her touch. “We’ve already found everlasting life, hon.” She hands the street preacher a tiny rainbow flag and flashes that megawatt smile. As I stand on my tip toes trying to see what he will do next, I’m swept along in the crowd’s mingled indifference and enthusiasm. I keep craning my neck to look backwards, frantically trying to spot the plain wool suit amongst the energy. The crowd has swallowed him. The air shifts. What was once filled with humidity and chaos mixed with uncertainty is now alive with positivity and confidence all jumbled up and colorful. My energy shifts with the air. I push my shoulders back and feel my face open. Everlasting life, here I come. Katy is a writer and editor for a national engineering and surveying organization and a fiction editor for Identity Theory. Her writing has appeared in The Dead Mule School, Reckon Review, Cowboy Jamboree, Salvation South, and elsewhere. She has a prose collection forthcoming with Belle Point Press (2025). She was born and raised in South Carolina and lives with her spouse and two pups, Finn and Betty Anne. You can find her on Twitter at MarchingFourth and katygoforth.com.

Like so many others, Cormac McCarthy was profoundly influential to my literary practice. McCarthy’s prose left me aghast. Devoured. Devastated, but in the way that reckoning with the shock of extraordinary art can bring you to your knees. It often still does. McCarthy granted unimaginable freedom and dexterity to sentences, summoning images with such singular vision and intonation they read like incantations from another realm. Like painters and cinematographers, he possessed a staggering deftness for slanting the field of view to transpose once familiar objects and symbols into astonishment. His novels confirmed my instinctual love for stories that prize natural settings and lyricism as main events. I reveled in twisted delight at the desperate loners and their deplorable misadventures. I always kept a dictionary close so as not to stumble past signposts I didn’t readily recognize. While my reverence runs deep, so does my respect for criticisms about the trappings of McCarthy’s blood-drenched Westerns, despite what I read as a largely revisionist lens applied to the inhumanity of settler politics—my reading of Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy is that America is built on hypermasculine violence, and its borders are maintained through that same violence. But does that excuse the lack of fully-formed female characters in these stories? When women show up at the fringes—sometimes as rape victims or as Mexican love interests for white cowboys—what function do they serve? Colorado-based writer Raksha Vasudevan describes this complexity in her brilliant and beautiful essay “Hiking Cormac McCarthy’s Western Wilderness During an Immigration Crisis.” McCarthy’s hardboiled depictions of the American West and its taciturn cast fueled Raksha’s imagination as a shy child in India and years later, at the tail end of a two-year working visa, inspired a solo backpacking trip to locations that served as settings in his books. Upon visiting these chimerical borderlands as an adult during the Trump era, thoroughly exhausted by America’s hostility toward immigrants and greed for displacement, Raksha understands McCarthy’s depictions of the desolate frontier were “built on a white male mythology that left little space for women or people of color—for people like me….His portrayal of these lands as barren and ripe for conquest now rang less true than ever, a willful blindness in the vein of Manifest Destiny.” The takeaway of the essay isn’t a categorical admonishment of McCarthy’s work—at each stunning summit and star-laden campsite, Raksha pulls out her dog-eared sources of inspiration, studding the essay with razor-sharp, glistening passages of his that never cease to resonate. I came to McCarthy’s books in college, some of which I read while spending time on the Pine Ridge Reservation. I’d made relationships there through a Tribal development course, co-led by Mark St. Pierre of the Pine Ridge-based Wounded Knee Community Development Corporation. From 2009-2012, I returned nearly every six months on various invitations: supporting a science fair for Tribal youth; clearing flood debris around Henry Red Cloud’s Lakota Solar Energy Enterprise; house sitting for author Walter Littlemoon. Summer evenings on Walter’s porch, I’d bend back the spines of my paperbacks and breathe in the sugared smell of sage and musk of woodsmoke, listening to the western wheatgrass bending and swaying beneath breathlessly huge fuschia and bloodred sunsets. I frequently drove past the memorial site of the Wounded Knee Massacre, one of the most heinous acts of violence and betrayal committed by the federal government in its endless history of atrocities toward Native people. The depth of America’s colonial terrorism came into sharper view with each visit, cuspidated to a knife edge as I studied and listened to stories of how colonization continued to impact the lives of those around me. Though I’ve read it twice in the years since, I could never lucidly wade through the brutality inflicted on Indigenous peoples in Blood Meridian, despite its efforts to illuminate the federal government’s genocidal campaign to settle the west. Though this is hardly a moralistic gloat—Child of God, in all its sordid, reprehensible pageantry, remains a bilious darling on my bookshelf. As critical as it is to confront the magnitude of America’s barbarous treatment of Native bodies, at what point can the amplified portrayal of this violence cross over into voyeurism—particularly when rendered by a white writer and consumed by white readers, such as myself? I consider similar questions within the scope of violence against women as I pull out my treasured copy of Child of God, wondering how I can recall its depraved plot and still smile to myself, beguiled and amused and a tad contrite. But I do. Online, I observe an outpouring of grief from a diverse spread of writers, from S.A. Cosby to Gabino Iglesias to Lauren Groff to Porochista Khakpour to Raksha herself; writers of color, queer writers, and women writers grappling with the loss of this literary wunderkind; many of whom for, like me, McCarthy’s work left them gutted and awestruck; possessed and haunted. Like life so frequently demands, I wonder how to hold complex grief. I wonder how to honor my admiration while holding space for the highly necessary expansion of humanity in how we tell our country’s stories, even as we excavate the darkest chapters. I dig through my favorite sentences to share, wondering how to choose the one that resonates most deeply. I decide to select one that sparks light in this moment, understanding that my beloveds, like me, are incomplete, fallible, and ever-evolving: “They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.” - Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses Patricia (Patty) McCrystal is a writer from Arvada, Colorado. She received her MFA from Regis University. Her work can be found in Roi Fainéant Press, Joyland Magazine, Oyster River Pages, JMWW Journal, Atticus Review, Slippery Elm Literary Journal, PBS, and more. Her work has won the Slippery Elm Prose Prize and has received a Pushcart Prize nomination, a Best of Net nomination, and a Best American Short Stories nomination. This summer, she was a selected participant for the Kenyon Review and American Short Fiction writing workshops.