Issue #103

James Scannell McCormick

Fire in April

Don’t believe the nor’easter that brawls and bawls
down from the Pole – still less the boldfaced snow
that loiters, glares in thicknesses stiff from squalls
of hail and ice-spall. Don’t believe the bow

of dun horizon, single digits at night,
or, sulking in pots, window herbs on the sill:
woody rosemary, lavender crisped yet light-
sick. Believe instead the flames that blaze the grille

and grate of your fireplace, chafe the vase of cut
carnations and singe their crimped petals to gold
and orange. That heat. That life. In ditch and rut
and snowplow gouge, alongside runnels in mold-

softened bark, up brittle stipes of ferns,
a fire for waking – believe it – burns and burns.

Four Lighthouses

1. Pilot Island

Once the blare of your voice in tonguing fog snuffed keeper’s lights,
Curdled milk, addled eggs snug in the nest. Now only sated, dank
Cormorants that hang an ashleaf maple dead from their guano. You think
Those birds are like old tales: They shift and fret. They wait.

2. Plum Island

This water has starved forever. You would call out to warn back
Misguided schooners, but even so it chewed and toothed to flotsam their
Cargos of pinewood, salt. You read how the water licks the shore’s
Lip of spurge. It could swallow all that, too. And never choke.

3. Boyers Bluff

Barebones, behindhand, you wonder if you have ever been real. Ask, below
You, the drop’s fractured caprock, or even — darker, deeper — ask brown-flecked trout
That sulk and waver, unlit. Or vanishing grackles that tread and float
Your headland — ask them. And for your answer: both soonest, and ago.

4. Rock Island

A good name, hold neo hearth-runes in the Lannon stone boathouse, outlasts
Death. How would you ‐ mute — say what that means? — Honey bees weight
Raspberry canes, sprawl of Icelandic thyme. Between earth and water, and yet
Not really either, you keep your peace, the world spindrift and dust.

James Scannell McCormick’s third book of poetry is First of Pisces (Kelsay Books). He lives and teaches college English in Rochester, Minnesota.

Jason M. Vaughn

Wind

It got into the gutter in the morning
dark, but something had roused me before
those juddering deep groans of the aluminum
started. Coincidence? Anxiety about changes
to come? The notification of some primeval storm
warning that evolution long ago installed?
I woke to quiet darkness, enough time to
roll onto my side and try to dream again. Then
there was a strong sigh of near trees
and the ill-omened straining (a muted cracking?)
of my townhouse as it was pressed
by the wind. What could this force be—how
could it even be seen—without other things
to push against or move
through? It stirs dry leaves to a fervent rustling
like an applause, then carries them away.
As ubiquitous as God, it carves rocky landscapes
on myriad other worlds even as it gently delivers
the frail spores of this one. Thousands
of years past, it brushed and rosied the cheeks of young
and old (penniless and princely) in the same manner
that it grazes them now. It can blow
cold or hot, send rooted grass and mountains
of cloud running off over hilltops.
And in the wee hours on the last day
I would sleep in my first house, moving
men coming before noon, the way it
reverberated a simple length of metal made me wonder
how the wind of my life (my actions, things I said
or didn’t say (the sheer fact of my existence))
has been made perceptible in others, and also
how the calm breezes and odd gusts of those others
have resonated in me, similar effects
happening for everybody everywhere—
countless draughts of circumstance merging
into a single planet-sized gale just as
differing currents of water can make up an ocean.
Where will it all drive us? How
purposefully or aimlessly?
And for how long?

Jason M. Vaughn lives and writes in Basehor, KS. His work has appeared in various journals, including 5×5, Barnstorm Journal, The Kansas City Star, Green Hills Literary Lantern, and Monkeybicycle.

Katrina Greco

the final girl vs. nostalgia

i linger on the edge
a yard gone to clover
all over a love
in petals
the cigarette malady of may
that girl and her voice
one dry summer i looked
down in a dirty back
seat, past tense, i heard
the buzz of years
in the fur of our tongues
my neck all in bloom
and we
over here
dogearring under the tree
the chalkboard gone
the flip phones
the vernacular bonds
even your mom
i should have
i won’t

Katrina Greco is a poet and educator in Oakland. Her debut collection, Everywhere Green and Scorch Marked, can be found at White Stag Publishing.

J-T Kelly

Trip to the Coast

The hat passed, he bought the ticket for the plane
and put aside everything he thought about the west coast.
His daughter said a journey is like a pencil—sharp at one end.
What had he been saying, he wondered, when he was her age?
But the future is not a question the past can answer,
and he was glad of the chance to make a change.

It’s when you get as far as Kansas you start to see a change.
even though you can’t see much through the tiny window. The plains
have become a question the mountains will answer.
And then the desert steps you back in time to when the coast
was farther out—or farther in, I don’t remember. The last ice age
changed so much, and then things have been so stable since its end.

I suppose the shape of things I’ve come to know is at an end.
You said to be like little children we have to always change.
But what does childhood have to do with age?
My brother’s health precludes him flying on a plane,
so we will drive all the way back home from the coast.
I believe it’s a blessing—all that time to question, all that time to answer.

When he was asked how he knew God’s will, he couldn’t answer.
How can you answer a question that does not end?
How do people navigate in the deep, out of sight of the coast?
We’re above the foothills now, and the weather’s starting to change.
Clouds have crowded in around the plane.
All I can see is the wing, the rivets showing signs of age.

When you’re young a year or two is a big difference in age,
and it’s a big deal to be the first to know an answer.
His younger brother had been the first to fly on a plane,
and he lorded it over him to no end.
When did all that competition change
to distance? Me in Indiana and him on the coast?

We’re over the Sierra Nevadas now and approaching the coast.
I shouldn’t sit cramped like this for so long at my age.
I remember flying when I was younger, and I wonder at the change.
There were no questions I didn’t want to answer.
There was no journey I wanted to end.
I just wanted to get drunk on the plane.

He called his wife as soon as he got off the plane.
He left a message. Because of the time change, he knew she wouldn’t answer,
but it didn’t matter. I knew you were on the other end.

J-T Kelly works in real estate in Indianapolis. He lives in a brick house with his wife, their six children, his two parents, his brother, and a dog. Chapbooks More of How to Read the Bible (above/ground, 2025) and Like Now (CCCP/Subpress, 2023).

Peter Cashorali

Chocolate

When eating less chocolate than you want, seek out the aroma first. What is that? Frankincense or some other costly substance. Orchids made of kept promises. In the mouth chocolate pauses for a long insane moment and then melts as lead does, in a crucible of desire, slowly and with small bolts of lightning in the jaw. It gives hints of scorched earth, and the suggestion that long ago all the black land was volcanoes. A mild grit chastises the teeth. As the chocolate disappears in the river of longing and saliva follow it in its journey as far as you can. Notice how at last you are left behind, standing at the mouth of a dark cavern, alone with grief for someone whose name you've already forgotten. Are you prosperous or bankrupt? Would another piece of chocolate help? Help what?

Peter Cashorali is a neurodivergent queer psychotherapist, formerly working in HIV/AIDS and community mental health, currently in private practice in Portland and Los Angeles. Recent work appears or is upcoming in Synkroniciti, Abandoned Mine, Temple in a City, Brief Wilderness and Soul Forte Journal.

Saad Kayani

Svidrigailov

I am going to America now.
Packing light, just the one shirt
I have on.
I hope the passage is easy.

By a muddy river, I hope to sit with him,
the tall man of sorrows, and say nothing,
just watch the current carry the long afternoon away,
sharing the deep quiet that follows the cannons.

Then, to find a stillness of a different sort,
to watch her tend her dashes as if they were seedlings
in a winter garden—to witness the patient
cultivation of a single line.

High in the ranges, I’ll look for the prophet
with a beard of frost and bark, his gaze fixed
on the granite sermons of the peaks.
He will not speak, only trace a crack in the ice
with a reverent finger, and I will learn the age of the world.

But if none of this occurs—
if the riverbank is vacant, if Amherst is silent,
the high ranges only rock and wind—

does the tomb hold nothing within?

Saad Kayani is a Pakistani-Canadian poet living in Toronto. Words forthcoming in Blue Unicorn.

Litong Nie

Saxophone Concerto to Fireworks

Fireworks streak through my city
on that picnic-on-a-hill fourth of July,
these rupturing peonies, that candied America—
God, they’re gonna kill someone.

Remember that beautiful human
dangled against the Trade Center?
These sparklers, arrested
over Tel Aviv?
Freeze frames—
but you forget:
we are not
albatross.

Packed bags and tail lights—
we carry petals on our eyelids,
and light-etched faces,
and za’atar loafs
and picked marigolds…
Mother, you can’t cradle all that is in you—
this road is home.

Litong is an amateur poet based in San Jose, CA. With a background in philosophy, his work dwells on human liminality and transformation. He is also a professional Radiohead fan.

John J. Ronan

You Are Now Here

Love another. Or glory, gold.
Be present in a web of old days
And pastimes, a comfy grudge.
Alive and therefore qualified
High step at history’s van –
Cheops to Kant, Barnum, Astaire…
The fire ant barge on great
Waters, our matted present nest.
Or look aloft to the star-and-planet
Charting of pride, importance, place,
The dangers of caveat, come-on.
Draw cards: Magician or Fool,
Hermit, Justice, the Horseman
Who will point, meaning you,
And ride off, lost from view.
Never search for anchored ends
Of threads, or crane around and down
For crosshatched calendar lines,
The cat’s cradle, the unclapped hands.


John J. Ronan is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Poetry, a former Ucross Fellow, Bread Loaf Scholar, and Poet Laureate of Gloucester, MA. His work has appeared in Times Literary Supplement, Main Street Rag, Woven Tale, Thrush, Confrontation, Folio, Threepenny Review, The Recorder, and Hollins Critic.

Rachel Dacus

Often I Hear a Name on the Wind

In small birds murmuring,
I hear rosaries being murmured
between wind-bounced branches
and in the constant peck and cheep
a knitting circle’s gossip.
A name. I step away

from the twittering and let go the falling
anchor of my time for the length
of an oriole’s plangent whistle
to rest fluid and listening, boneless
and called.

We are awakening these days
to the lie behind the news, the true
names of things as we struggle in the body’s
meshful sieve that catches only
what you can hear of the whole.
I hear a name and become
its acorn cap

and burrow into soft-packed earth.
Become the tiny ant crossing
the desert of my sleeve.
Sometimes it’s the smallest
sounds that exalt the spirit
until it beats its own name
with sun-flared wings.


Rachel Dacus has published seven novels and four poetry collections. Her poetry appears in Boulevard, Gargoyle, Prairie Schooner, and the anthologies Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California and Nūr Mélange: A Ghazal Anthology. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her architect husband and Silky Terrier.

Sam Kerbel

How Many Mirrors Brighter

That limpid arctic light cuts 
Your body in two, as you
Lie there, as if you’d lived 
A life too long abandoned 
By subtle shifts nestled 
In the marble gaps between
Apocalypses. It can go
On longer, but you must ask,
And the cadence for entry 
Changes every time. Don’t 
Worry friend, don’t worry, bring 
That bottle of wine, good cheer.
Leave yourself at the door.
There’s a museum with portraits of
The Founding Fathers gathered on
Thomas Paine’s riverboat cruise, that 
Thrift store down the block has 
A cafe in the back decorated with
All your desires in Hudson River
Form. Your dreams darken when
The rain stops — “Those mountains 
Are ominous.” Another people 
Gathers at mountain-foot, darker
Than the trees. But always 
Something changes, the clocks
Stutter, several golden branches creep
Like tentacles across the window
As you sleep. Maybe the moon
Will follow, or maybe she’ll stay put.
Either way your feet stay bound.
Either way the saint’s horizon
Bares her sword.

Sam Kerbel was shortlisted for the 2024 Oxford Poetry Prize. His first chapbook, Can’t Beat the Price (2025), is available from Bottlecap Press. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Anthropocene, Lana Turner, La Piccioletta Barca, Pamenar Magazine, and South Florida Poetry Journal, among other publications.

John A. deSouza

New Myths

I’d speak with you guised as horse-eared semblance.
I was plucked down and pressed into summer’s mash,
enjoy olives the color of my eyes, hazel of tilled
earth and scent of sage combined—New wine
in my blood, I ran with teasing Naiads, slept—
Summer thickened, desultory with the same mawed torpor
as ever, stretched out dreaming in that evergreen
pause of water and sun, that brightly pins you.
Did fauns slip through the afternoon leaves’ shadows
following nymphs and naiads, only to fall asleep,
or was that just me dozing off, exhausted, drunk.
Lyrics of a lesser seeking than these reach
inwards past tongues and muscled grasp, tensioned
flex, into this realm that answers through resembled lives
that never were enmeshed in these voiced figments
that here become alive. So answer me, poet,
but not from within artificial circles carved from
the struggles of lesser rivals—No longer herdsman
passing poetry under laurel trees, while the sheep
munch and shit, flock as they must, unknowing
of death and thought’s end unlike us. To make
new myths for distant audiences with benefit
of collapsed and sunken empires reduced to stone and crown,
bone and written records copied across surfaces,
preserved to flesh out whatever present bores
or terrified them. You, my maker at the end
of another time like this, poised for or against
the seep of new authorities, new threats,
how sunlight seeps across the same horizon.

John A. deSouza’s chapbook, ‘Hidden’, was recently published by Bottlecap Press. His collection,‘Unimaginable Hardship’, was short-listed for the Letter Review Prize. He has been/will be published in: The Writing Disorder, the engine(idling, WayWords, Apricity Press, The Orchards, All Existing Literary Review, Half Eaten Mouth, Big Scream Magazine and others.