Extraterrestrials — we chart the topographies of feeling. We abducted grief, poked and prodded: found nocturnes, saline solutions, saxophones thrown through broken windows. The cartography shifts. Lost, we erase memory. Light-years distant from even ourselves, we miss most the missing time. — MARK L. ANDERSON Mark L. Anderson lives and writes in Spokane, Washington. He … Continue reading Close Encounters
Let’s take a break. Let’s take five. No, seven, in honor of the seventh day. No, in honor of the cigarette, which takes exactly seven minutes to smoke all the way down. Let’s call it quits. Let’s take a liquid lunch and not come back for days, weeks, months. Let’s not and say we did. … Continue reading Quits
The flowers have wilted now. Burnt orange half moon pistils burst forth from a sea of darkening, lily white. Amid the detritus living on the kitchen counter: discarded dirty socks, molding dish sponge, half-empty casserole pan, unsigned school assignments, sits a yellow vase. I find myself furious at the browning, crinkled remnants of life so … Continue reading One Week After
Here are Hidden Peak Press' 2022 Pushcart Prize nominees. Listen, I Need to Tell You Something by Andrea Lawler A Dead Thing by Adam Greenfield A Study of Skeletons / A Cherry Tree Picked Clean by McCaela Prentice The Clearing by Mathieu Cailler Metaphysical Twitch by Margaret Saigh Friend of Pig by Peter Alterman The … Continue reading 2022 Pushcart Prize Nominees
As the train sends ripples into the Hudson, I imagine bloodwood carvings awakening beneath the surface to be baptized in mud, to commune with an assembly of tadpoles. I think of the components of a river when I am traveling, but more often now as the Mississippi and the Colorado recede. I remind myself it’s … Continue reading Southbound Amtrak
The forest is carpeted with October. The ochre, red, and gold hold an old dog firm as he limps through the dry crackling. Horse tails swat at the last of the flies, and the geese pond hop across the county. Snow, sleet, and ice loom; sheets of white stripping the earth, blanketing the conifers. Until … Continue reading Changing Seasons
The wolves of Smyrna howl from their refuge to their timber kin by the Boundary Waters, to the coyotes beyond the fencing, to the yellow labs at the autobody shop. We humans hear it and long to answer the call like some futile response to untamed sorcery. We forage for cow pies to pick psilocybin … Continue reading Wolf Mountain Center, Central New York
Because I’m the seer deep within the tower, preferring the whip to the prayer cords, the rough wool & hard stone to the downy pillow, it’s too easy to hear it from you, such prophecies of who I am & will be — how can I believe unless an old book says my name in … Continue reading The Prophecy
She was right, you do resemble the moon. A vision. Dim light The opening of a mouth, a door, a soul I reach my fingers through your corridors “Am I interrupting?” It’s a delicate space, pink rooms filled with glass The tip of my toes trying hard not to touch them I was never one … Continue reading fans over knobs
Lincoln published poems in the Springfield paper dripping with daggers and cries in the dark Styron filled pages with treacherous weather howling tempests and horrific gray drizzle for me — it’s a dime-store black plastic mask I wore as a child on Halloween the kind with the two impractical nose holes and the … Continue reading Use Metaphors to Describe Your Depression