WHEN THE FIRST SHELLS fall nearby, the early afternoon prayer is underway. I am explaining to young Khaled why his mistake was due to the incorrect verb usage. “You wrote, It rain in autumn. It should be, It rains in autumn. If the subject is he, she or it, the correct verb is rains, … Continue reading Autumn Rain(s)
IN THE EVENINGS after she gets out of the shower, which she takes with the bathroom door ajar so that you and a nurse can call to her every two minutes and make sure she’s okay, you help your daughter thread her i.v. tubes and monitor wires through the wide sleeves of her hospital gown, … Continue reading In 2020 Everyone Got COVID But She Got An Eating Disorder Instead
GABBY MCCURTRY PULLED INTO the narrow garage under her townhouse. The day she’d moved in, she tied plastic spoons to bright yellow yarn, suspended them from the ceiling as parking parameters. She eased her car forward, nudged the dangling spoons, and peered into all corners. Once certain she was alone, she pushed the gearshift into … Continue reading Risk Management
STANDING IN LINE for our food stamps, I thought of my new love, a tiny Asian stripper with two young kids working it in a KCDC housing project polluted with bloody gangsters while trying hard to make it out – killing rats and the resident sewer roaches, wanting that degree from the community college, somehow … Continue reading Surviving It All
Here are Hidden Peak Press' 2023 Pushcart Prize nominees. While Seeking to Understand Her Brother's Death by Camille LebelPainkillers by Julius OlofssonWindmill Tequila by J. Alan NelsonI Miss You, I Love You by Skylar CampDaytime Fireworks by Matthew MersonFrancis The Shards by Michael Dean Clark The Pushcart Prize honors the best poetry/fiction in small presses … Continue reading 2023 Pushcart Prize Nominees
MY SISTER AND HER KIDS overtake the house, absorbing my six-year-old Kate into their stampede, exhorting her to find her shoes, hurry. They hustle her toward the door in a comical cacophony, as if to pile into a clown car. “’Bye, Mom!” Kate pauses for just a moment. “You’ll be here when I get back, … Continue reading July
HE TAKES LONG DRAGS off his cigarette while driving his pickup truck down the rain-wet road, slick and dark as a whale’s back. The yellow, sodium-vapor glow of streetlights filter through the late-night drizzle and glint off the scar on his forearm—old, yet babyflesh smooth, sharing canvas space with the tattoo of a stained glass … Continue reading Mirrors
A THICK LAYER of unnaturally gray dust coated the studio, a reminder of the decay and horror that now coated the world. Instead of silken pointe shoes, she strode across the wooden floor in black boots scuffed raw from use. Glass crunched underfoot; it might have come from the broken window, the window she had … Continue reading The Barren Barre
DULLEN SKIES BEGAN to turn from overcast to burdened by clouds that amassed beyond cobbled streets and slanting homes as I approached a memory only to be revisited once more. But it is in glasses of sparkling libation that true vulnerability arises. Suffering guised by confidence and consumption. We spoke in parables of reflection as … Continue reading Prinsengracht
IT IS BENDING into the wind as it passes from left to right across the darkening skyline. Angles overlay flatness. A black spider on a gray blanket. White darts spike the firmament. Then land and arrange themselves on the lamp posts, beaks jabbing, heads wrenched backwards, framing screams. It, the thing describing the arc of … Continue reading The Portal