Category: Uncategorized
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Best of the Net Nominations
Ahoy, Me Hearties! We netted some real keepers this past year at Skipjack camp. It wasn’t easy deciding which pieces to nominate. We’ve been plucking flower petals, consulting the Almanac, and tracking the migratory patterns of birds, and we’re happy to report that we’ve come to a decision! Best of the Net Nominations 2027: “River”…
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Chris Dahl
Earth Day The starlings live one neighborhood removed from mine. So dark, they remind me of moonless nights when it’s just the universe and stars— How far away they are, those stars. They don’t even know we’re here. Does this love ever stop—this love for dirt and wind— flowers from a hundred different countries live…
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Louis Faber
Patio I sit on the patio of the hotel room along the coast and stare up. I reach out for the stars etched in the firmament and burn my fingers. Louis Faber is a poet and writer. His work has appeared in severalanthologies and in The MacGuffin, Cantos, Alchemy Spoon, New FeathersAnthology, Flora Fiction, Dreich…
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Kai Cooley
Manchester Island On the mainland, Ricky sat on a metal milk crate in a bird blind he’d made of driftwood and jimson weed stems. Leafy branches overhead caged the blue of the sky. At his ear, a mosquito crooned of bloodlines. He raised his grandpa’s antique binoculars towards the arrowhead-shaped wedge of land in the…
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Sam Hunter
Fire Season The wind dies and the sound of the pines stops the smoke slowly settles into depressions to smother thoughts of bluer skies there will be no sunset tonight hopes of rain from the gray mass brought in by the wind have dissipated with the ashy orange haze descending from the north where another…
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Issue Seven
Extra! Extra! Read all about it! That’s right, you guessed it: Issue Seven is a/live and kickin’! Tell your friends. Tell your neighbors. Kick off your shoes and dive right in! This anthology is short and sweet, a few of the finest things we found in the garden this summer, including a few critters I…
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The Hills, Alive, Sing Their Thanks
Hello Dear Chum, We interrupt this ego trip for an important message: Hi. How are you today? How are you doing? (How you doin’?) (Joey, please.) Seriously, in case nobody’s told you lately, we’re proud of you. How hard you’re working. All the extra effort you worry is wasted. (It isn’t!) How much you contend…
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David Elliot Eisenstat
Departures Despite the sunset ripening to starboard, I look up: steel ribs swallow the river as we slip beneath the Manhattan Bridge, our twilit wake cut off by a tugboat towing sediment. If I had worked the caisson, what would I believe? Down there, in a pine box with Jonah and the crew, we shoveled…
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John Grey
Lacuna Late sun leans in on the pond’s rim, golden and unhurried, through the yellow arms of witch hazel. The bracken bows low, still holding its tattered grace like a prayer half-remembered. Light gleams, no urgency, merely the calm of an early night. Memory and longing are the human sides to this. They return, again…
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Megan Blankenship
Descendant’s Invocation Dadgum if grieving’s not a full-time endeavor. Are you still with me, Steve? I think I feel you in what snags my senses—a porch light’s chuckle on the darkling hillside, or is it Venus, hovering low? An owl’s offended growl coasting on cicadas’ backs. This body’s tendency toward addiction. They say you get…
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Announcing Issue 6
Hello Dear Chum, Need a good salve for the head or heart? Issue 6 of Skipjack Review is (a)live and available for free PDF download at skipjackreview.com/archives, so swim on over and download yourself a copy! All organic and loaded to the gills with radiance sure to cure what ails you, Issue 6 is a…
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Revelations, Renovations, and Cold Hard Cash
Hello, Dear Chum, As you may have noticed, we’ve had a submissions makeover. Eyes up here, please. Yes, we’ve been changing some things. For one thing, we’re now accepting submissions through Submittable. For another, we’re now a paying market. Actually, 2025 marks our third year awarding the Dead Herring Prize to writing that slays real…
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A Conversation with Mary Collins
Jim: The river has always been my happy place. Any river. Anywhere. However, one specific region always comes to mind: the Dora, MO area, where there are as many watering holes as names in the phonebook. I was fortunate enough to call Dora “home” for a number of years. Mary and I were even neighbors…
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“Portages” by Rebecca Callahan
They portaged into the Minnesota wilderness for six hours that day. They carried the heavy canoe through the narrow, wooded trails, sometimes a mile or more, until they could put it into the water again. Each time they came to another portage, where shallow rapids flowed over exposed rocks, they climbed out of the canoe…
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“River” by Peter Cashorali
The final piece is our dying. Not hurried to or gotten through, Not flinched from though if so That’s part of it too. As if the end of the river Wasn’t a falls or an ocean But the entire river, A single word of everything, Seen and read and taken in. As if it was…
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“The Creek in Winter” by Mary Ellen Shaughan
She places one foot down, then the other, gleaming blades meet glistening ice. After a few tentative strides, she stretches her legs, then pushes, soon finding her rhythm, propelling her forward, away from the creek’s bank where tufts of brown grass tremble, following the meandering path as it bisects snow-covered fields. Her blades chatter over…
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A Texas Gulf Coast Baptism
is a momentous affair. Veneration drives steaming bodies into revelrous, unsurvivable throngs. Humidity compounds, heat makes us suffer, and wind-whipped children play house on the sand. I’ve walked all the way here with a bag in my pocket to collect washed up trash: bottle caps, fishing line, wedding rings. A baby cries and it sounds…
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A CONVERSATION WITH MARCUS CAFAGÑA
Poet extraordinaire and all-around good guy, Marcus Cafagña, has seen his poetry published in hundreds of magazines across the country, including AGNI, Witness, Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and on and on and on. His first book, The Broken World, was selected for the National Poetry Series. In a review of The Broken World,…
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“Chipmunk Summer” by Ed Ahern
Chipmunks have reentered my stone walls and flitter-twitch across the open grass guessing that a thing as grossly large as me cannot be a healthy coexistence. They dart into the spaces between rocks, suspicious little sentinels intent on their anonymity. I could with time and guile persuade them to take peanuts from my fingers, but…
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Announcing the Winner of the 2024 Dead Herring Prize
Ho ho ho-ly mackerel, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas! Gridlock as far as the eye can see. The smell of burning money in the air. There’s a negativity scene at every grocery store. A baby in a manager. Yuletide insults being slung by a guy dressed like he just left the gym.…
