After Stephanie Kirby The dead baby stepped off the train,Found no one waiting, no one holding aSign printed with a name to be recognizedBut not remembered. Somewhere anIrregular machine beeped. The dead babySaw our broken smiles split as we triedNot to be alone with each other. You, me, And the dead baby. Overhead lights … Continue reading Together
You appear in a class photo of everyone you’ve ever known, garbled knot of your expression. Your guide is a chance operation. Your colors, red and gold. Your parents were pole-sitters, rag-pickers. They found you in a basket of gestures. You’ve been keeping a scrapbook of sticks and grubs, swatches from a sanitary landfill. Like … Continue reading Sooth Saying
I have a little utopia in the middle of an apocalypse I have friends & sesh & fictional escapism I have a palace of mold in a city of unaffordable living I have a sacred space upon land that’s slowly shrinking I have love when all around me I see hate I have unity as … Continue reading Little Utopia
Stems once used as armor, teach me how to harden with tenderness O evergreen perennial.I carry you home with two 40 oz cervezas& some real slim thick incensenamed Renewal. I need to cover the decaythat belongs to the body of yesteryear —the tissue fibers, sinew I tied upin lavender-scented contractor bags.I situated you in the … Continue reading Ode to Bamboo Stalks I Bought at the Liquor Store
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 asshole, and why I keep checking its horoscope why my secret identity is a factory-reject breast pump why I only feel close to my ancestors when I eat an apple on a church stoop the grave I’m digging with a golden shovel, cursing the bend of soft metal why I keep getting blackout … Continue reading My Therapist Found My Poems and Now She Has Questions About
After four years of working night shifts In gestures of victory and mouthing the word "boom" As the pythons have no natural predators in Florida I will make your sandwich for you By scooping out the bagel's chewy insides When humans started burning fossil fuels Because there was no more room. — BOONA DAROOM Boona … Continue reading Live Your Best Lie
And at a family meal at a Roppongi restaurant Where the napkins are origami cranes but there is Western cutlery to show progress My cousins whisper that when I finish I should shout “Gotsan deshita!” which is what gangsters say When they’re done eating So I yell it at the end of dinner the whole … Continue reading My Japanese Cousins Teach Me Yakuza Slang
after Wallace Stevens 1. “They’re the angels’ sofa cushions,” her daughter says. “When they bounce on them, their mummies shout.” 2. She listens to what the lady in the chair beside hers is saying as the stylist makes her hair bigger, bigger, bigger. 3. The clouds move as quickly as her mother’s memories, drifting out … Continue reading Ten Ways of Looking at Clouds
To what extent this will shorten my life is a question I will not ask. I do not want an answer. People get older. People forget. People die. The calendar dictates, you could say, all things. The waterfall that we visited in the morning when you were nineteen was not Niagara. We sat down beside … Continue reading At the Waterfall