Outliving Michael by Steven Reigns Review by Maria Duarte                  Steven Reigns’s Outliving Michael  is not just a collection of poems commemorating his friendship with Michael but also a fragmentated storyline of Michael’s life. Throughout the poems fragments of Michael’s personality can be seen by the reader which is not only getting Reigns’s perspective of Michael but also Michael’s way of living.                The images on the poems are clear and concrete and g

Surfers Just Know Other Surfers by Scarlett Davis   Before the surf lesson, before the sexual assault, I had spent the night researching snake trails on the beach. Sea snakes ! It was the worst kind of internet rabbit hole to fall down while on vacation. Yet thanks to TikTok, I had conjured an image that I couldn’t shake: a snake reverse-lassoing its way down from a coconut tree, edging towards the water for a morning cold plunge, all before sunrise or the tourists. And, othe

The Ring by Will Evans When I was a senior in high school, my best friend was Jimmy Reed. He was a lanky boy with sad, brown, hollow eyes, and he grew up in Tennessee and had a soft Southern drawl. We lived near the falls of a river and went there to swim after school. We’d strip down to our Jockeys, run off the edge of a big flat rock, fling our arms over our heads, and do front flips and gainers. Anyway, Jimmy had this ring, and you could see it was special to him. It slid

Fiction By Daniel Mahoney The pier stretched into the sea like a broken promise, shrouded in morning fog. Everything was gray. The ocean, the clouds, her thoughts. One vast canvas of stillness and sorrow. The wooden boards creaked softly beneath her steps as she moved toward the end, her wool coat clutched tight against the salt-heavy wind. In her gloved hands, she held a dented thermos and two tin cups, as she had every year for the past nine. He would come. He always did. S

Four Poems by Virginia LeBaron Bathyal We have cut each otherloose, like fisherfolkwho push out hookswith calloused thumbs,toss the small ones back. They go on to survive. Find their school.But when the wind kicks upa certain way, slides the waterlike cellophane over bait with a silver glintthat, this time, looks different –there is that age-old tugdeep in the membranes of our slimy gums. And right before all is almost all lost, again,we pull away from air and lightcast our l

Left Behind by Niles Reddick               I know we live in a postmodern world, one that is 24–7, but I don’t believe humans are made to work all night long. I didn’t mind working in high school or college and paying my own way in the world, but I absolutely hated the 11:00 p.m.–7:00 a.m. shift. I downed rank coffee and smoked cigarettes, blue haze floating under fluorescent lights, and didn’t care that I reeked like a skunk. Because most normal people were asleep, I didn’t

The Queen of Whales by Arben Alovic He met her by the ocean, where mornings smelled like salt and low tide, and the herons called like ghosts over the gray horizon. She stood barefoot on the sand, sketchbook in one hand, coffee in the other, her arm a map of black and white whales. They swam up her arm, across her wrist, and disappeared beneath her sleeve, over old scars. Faded lines, softened by ink and time. “They cover what I used to be,” she said once, when she caught him

You Wouldn’t See Me If I Wasn’t Here by Carolyn Fagan “You fucked up the cream filling again,” shouted Bobby, turning from the register while still sliding the alleged fucked-up Creamy TM  across the counter to the customer, a tall man burned bronze by the sun, the type of tan achieved only on the skin of Caucasian Floridian retirees intent on becoming more reptilian than human. Summer was barely cracking open, but snowbirds and wealthy weekend visitors were already bloating

by Brian Townsley Black & White Blues_ The film was in black & white & grey, they always forget the grey, despite its domination, and the camera panned away from the bodies, shot through and husked of any nationalism or bravery now & anyways it slung to the warehouse rooftop & there a murder of ravens, from the distance of the camera the oily sheen still shone like shoe polish used as blackface, like death given gloss. & as the last gunshot echoed like every gunshot ever loo

Far From Any Coast Joe Cusick   The surfer lives an enticing lifestyle. I remember as a kid watching clips of cheeky dudes and beautiful women partying on ocean beaches. Cameras capturing shots of young people emerging from tropical warm water and running barefoot down a sandy shore. Or a gaggle of surfers straddling their boards, suspended at sea, waiting for the next glossy set as the sun rises.          But a landlocked state creates limitations for this lifestyle. Namely,

The Hold by Raymond Brunell They told me I was killing myself, and they could have been right. My body kept its own accounts then—ribs showing through my nightgown, spine like rosary beads beneath the fabric. I was ten years old, and I weighed fifty-three pounds, and I had not eaten anything that once swam for eight months, two weeks, and four days. My mother believed it was stubbornness. My father believed it was a sickness of the mind. Neither of them believed it was my bod

Through the Break by Kelly McLean Charlotte stood at the edge of a high bluff, looking out over the water below, rented surfboard, large and heavy, clamped under her arm. Tall palm trees swayed restlessly behind her in the warm breeze, which was ripe with the scent of salt water and coconut sunscreen. Clouds obscured the morning sun in the unsettled sky, turning the normally turquoise Caribbean a deep navy blue. It was hard to explain why she was standing on a hilltop in Barb

Two Poems by Rob Roberge Plan B 1. I should have known from the gales of red wind this morning that the day would not go according to plan. Harrison, the driver, had been late and the dame was anxious and panicked before we had even talked through the practice run. She made suggestions without sense and her eyes were those of the hunted. Not even whiskey can cure that kind of fear. I went forward with the thing because the plan was in place, the deck had been cut & the cards

Puerto Escondido by Joshua Forehand As we ascended the Sierra Madre del Sur mountain range in southwest Mexico, it appeared that our bus driver had a death wish. Breaking ever so slightly for the blind 180-degree turns of the narrow alpine road, the driver laughed it up with his first mate as he accelerated to the absolute maximum on the short straightaways. My Lonely Planet guidebook warned of the potential for motion sickness with this particular route, so my childhood frie

Palm by Josh Megson Beneath Marlboro smoke touching the ceiling, I put an afternoon gin on my tab. Outside, the sun gleams off white sand and blinds a boardwalk of red-tan tourists hauling coolers and wincing at the sandspurs grabbing hold. The locals shake cigarette packs, shoot pool on ripped-carpet tables, sip liquor straight, dance a lethargic two-step to a skipping country record, and thank the heavens they spent the last decade here at Rosco’s Bar because their hard-ear

by Leanne Phillips Jaime Parker Stickle’s debut novel Vicious Cycle  is a thriller set in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. After two teenage girls are found hanged in a nearby park, former investigative reporter and new mother Corey Tracey-Lieberman is outraged. The girls’ murders are immediately blamed on street crime and quickly disregarded as unsolvable…or unworthy of the time, money, and effort necessary to solve them. Unfulfilled by her job as a

A Mourning Symphony   A quiet thunder muffled in the drums of cheap, thrift store speakers for years the volume knob was lost on a number line, stuck at a low grumble, generic static so pervasive I confused its cancer for consonance.   I forgot I was a string q

Trust   Yesterday I found a faith stone on Barry Beach. Sand and rain and sea testing its word in relentless ways. I took the pebble to a rock pool and found a dismembered crab. The sky peppered gulls and all their noise. I plopped the weight from my hand into salted water, like an alien from another universe.     Thimble   The sea breeze cuffs a skirmish of salt across the buckthorn; choughs clown above our path that clings to cliffs; sky, scarfed with cloud, ribbons through

By Ron Nelson   I wake to my tent etched with a cross stitching of frost, and my half-empty water jug frozen through. Though it’s early November, I wasn’t expecting temperatures to get so low. It’s the kind of cold where every noise breaks sharply across the open ground, with halting finch calls interrupted only by the sound of my tent zipper and gear latches. I’m slow to leave my sleeping bag and I quickly come to regret that I didn’t pack a second jacket. Fortunately, the s

I have been whacking caterpillars with an index finger Off my window sill. Down my wall. Into her soil. Not so today. She has brought her wiggly body with her again and creeps slowly on my cement like a slug. Thick like my thumb, she is nesting an explosion inside. I don’t think they’re that different - caterpillar and slug mishy mushy slow things that I was taught to squish. Instead I look at her today and know her for the first time She is ravenous of course - carrying a he