An independent literary press featuring poetry and short fiction at the confluence of Charles Simic and Ray Bradbury. We publish books and a periodic digital magazine, Hidden Peak Review.
“The dead have no ears, no answering machines that we know of — still we call.”
— BOB HICOK
Spotlight
The City Beautiful
Every angel is terrifying. -Rainer Maria Rilke part one, the rabbit county and the angel that never was I ENTER THE LONG winding roads of Prince Edward County. the destination is a house built on the water, industrial chic, and…
Yard Sailing
A pimple-faced teenager is rifling through boxes of books at his neighbor’s yard sale. He looks over his reading list for the upcoming school year. His neighbor, a dangerous sounding woman wearing a winter jacket with a fake fur collar…
Struck
What most people don’t realize is of the forty-nine of us on average to be struck by lightning each year, nine out of ten victims survive. It’s not many, but enough to be a majority statistic. Enough that support groups…
The Morning You Die
For Dave There is sun. Three geese fly Close enough to the water’s Surface to be skipped stones. I take to the dock and hop into The skiff, collect the tackle box And rods from yesterday, even find Your Islanders…
Some Time Ago
“WE SPECIALIZE IN GRIEF,” Doctor Henning said, “or should I say removing grief. Until now, only time could overcome human grief, and even then it did not fully eliminate it. Time would, and will, dull grief. It will wear away…
Neurotransmit
MAGPIES PERCH ON the branch of a golden Linden. I sit at the edge of my bed and watch the magpies dive and soar. I stay in this space of autumnal beauty. I slide across to the window. Tree roots…
Anniversary
He sits by himself, at a cheap Italian place on Mulholland. Loud opera music, cheap bread, and Chianti in its little straw suit. After paying the bill, he finishes his decaf, and takes one of the Crayons from the glass…
Gestation
I do not want children, yet I hide this from my Wife. She speaks of motherhood, pregnancy, asks Questions To her sister who has twin girls, shares photos With me Of her friends’ newborns. Aren’t they adorable, She asks. Look…
Reboot
Memories flicker like lights on a switchboard. No context, just images. A woman with soft hands. We’re on a roof top…
Requiem
Dry, brown pine needles drop off the tree onto the tarmac. The police watch from a safe distance. A fox goes back and covers his tracks. Less than a week later, a museum worker discovers a Da Vinci sketch of…
The Pleasure of Your Company, and Babies, Requested for a Celebration of the Union of our Marriage
ON PEARLIZED INVITATIONS, the words, “newborn babies required,” swirl above debossed emblems of storks. If potential guests are paying attention, they’ll see droplets falling from the satchel the stork is carrying, and they’ll probably think it has something to do…
No More Summers
When you wrote the bloodhounds and bandages into the script it was a question of refuting the silence, of torching the thread on the way out of the labyrinth They will say you are a poor excuse for a wanderer,…
Advantages of the Internet
If you search people who play golf with no hands on the internet you will meet a neighbor kid from my childhood who lived in the fancy house down the street. He plays golf, the internet says, plays golf with…
My Stupid Little Life
Let’s say stars can talk in conversations like the one we had last night about how fast life goes by us, about friends we’ve lost who have relinquished their shine in this universe and what if stars too could say…
And This is What it Means to be Awake for It
I promised I wouldn’t come back until I had no urge to doodle on the galaxy walls. In the remnants of the waiting room it was all up for grabs – the money I should have hidden away, the heart I should…
Names
Customers would try on baseball jerseys and eagerly turn in front of a full-length mirror to see someone else’s name stitched on their back. They’d ask for the tag to be cut, and walk out with the jersey still on,…
Exhaust
I buy a fire engine just in case and look for signs of beetle kill in every tree that I climb to retreat for a while. There is something sublime about a lone red trash can filled with flames, steam…
Interrupted Magnolias
I met a man I barely knew for tea — to see if I might catch the tail of something hard to hold, the way we do when we hear it’s raining meteors. In mere counter-moments we were mourning milestones…
Poem for my Neighbors
Listen: there’s nothing that can be done about it. Continents will drift about like bumper cars and the stars will spin drunkenly in the dark and atoms will slowly degrade into lesser atoms and sex and death will jostle for…
The Oracle
SAM WASN’T UNHAPPY to be called back to work so soon after little Gracie’s funeral. For the past two weeks since he’d challenged the psychic that Maura brought into their house she hardly answered him when he spoke to her,…
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