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