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
When we were finished, we stepped back and leaned against the black- dusted SUV in the driveway. Grains of wet dirt slicked our arms up to our elbows, sweat freckled our reddening skin, and the nebula imprint of the sidewalk dotted the skin of my knees. I asked her what she thought as we stood … Continue reading This Way
Among the pile of tires where we would hunt for snakes you showed me your new bruises. When I told you one of them looked like a buffalo on a bike, you flipped me off and climbed up the bank. It was Thanksgiving, and we were spending it like used dogs beneath the bridge that … Continue reading Cry Baby Bridge
All your life you waited for some tiny bird – a wren, a cardinal - somewhere in the world whose birth would change your fortune. But now that chirping creature of joy is dead, buried in the earth with its lovesongs & there’s nothing left nothing for you to wish for nothing nothing but a … Continue reading Done and Undone
It was the summer you burnt two acres of a corn field and almost the rest of town. You, the neighbor kid, and the pastor’s son shot off all the good fireworks we bought on the way back from the beach. You thought 2:30 pm in late July would be the best time to watch … Continue reading Daytime Fireworks