Each week, Hidden Peak Press highlights poetry, short fiction or flash fiction authors who move us.
To get your work under review for the Spotlight and also for our biannual digital magazine, head over to our Submit page.
Untitled (Jellyfish Poem)
The jellyfish take the 6:00 AM train down to the beach. Some of the jellyfish make it through the sliding doors, some of them fall off the platform onto the tracks. I am the only not jellyfish on the train.…
Zero/One
THE SCIENCE FICTION WRITER waited outside the hotel, a revolver hanging heavy in the inner pocket of his overcoat. He’d only fired it twice, but at close range he didn’t imagine he’d have any difficulties. His hand was steady as…
Blasting The Asteroid
First day of the World Series, autumn hanging on, each tree seeing who can keep from being a skeleton the longest: This is when my fear of dinosaurs hits the hardest. Imagining myself as oil. The giant veined maple on…
The Difference Between a Lake and a Pond
ALL THAT WINTER, they watched it. Someone had cleared a rectangle of snow from the frozen pond, or lake, whichever it was, that lay at the northernmost side of their neighborhood in Ypsilanti where the streets began to yield to…
Why James Tate and I May Write Alike
I GUESS I OWE everything to the old moose head hanging over the front desk at the Beaver Lake Lodge in Wild Duck, Minnesota. It is a rather large obnoxious thing even for me and it usually needs dusting. The…
2025 Pushcart Prize Nominees
Here are Hidden Peak Press’ 2025 Pushcart Prize nominees.
A lower middle-class laborer explains the economics
I finally got a refrigerator that dispenses cold, cold ice and water purified by a filter. Some people have these all their lives and some people never have them. I always go for ice now and I go for the…
Time Signatures
AS SOON AS he saw the interior of Maya Winger’s garage, Ram knew he’d be grateful to finish the day broke. She clearly knew she wasn’t just selling her father’s old junk; she offered something else: the man’s actual thoughts,…
Going to Bethel
And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him . . . And there came forth two she bears out…
People I Know, But Pretend Not To
Meg yells ‘whoa’ on the Ferris wheel but the spinning doesn’t stop. Harold chews one regret after another on a bed made for two. Jackie keeps walking the dog the opposite way it wants. Joe continues to converse with an…
What Happens in BC
I STUMBLE TOWARD SHORE, my teeth clacking together like musical spoons. After carrying me just a few yards, my wobbly pins introduce me face-first to the sand. I lie in a shivering heap and wait for the late afternoon sun…
Ascetics
ascetics want to do nothing but peel in places where angels attach to an obsessive love but don’t eat their crust – they were first manufactured in the middle ages and, in today’s world, correspond to a warped mirror or…
Bliss of Perspective Reality
WE’RE ALL IN the same space and time, but experiencing different perspective realities. The woman next to me is prosaic. The guy behind me is screaming his esophagus out. And I’m bug-eyed with excitement because I know I’m the winner…
Crystal
a clean wind through broken windows shadows of clouds across the hills, the freeways, the bright green back yards saw you standing at the desert’s edge heard the weight of truth in your silence said we are fucked but so…
Death Is A Tower (Cento)
I circled the sun with a lasso of figures in the dark, where every atom’s splitting. My fingers tingled, slowly growing numb. To make nothing, draw a circle around what isn’t there. Bless the hands in the mirror, whoever they…
The Inadvertent Adversary
SAM SAT IN HIS usual mom and pop on East Colfax waiting for his usual lunch. When the waitress arrived with the bowl of green chile stew he’d accidentally caught a glimpse of the TV screen on the wall to…
Baby’s On Fire
The stars peck our eyes as the night’s chemical grin rises. The wind plants a good-luck kiss on your cheek. We climb down the ladder, my hands behind your knees as we clear the last rungs. We have always touched…
Islands, In The Stream
IT WAS THE DAYS, for me, of Succession. Two of them, thirty-nine episodes. You can imagine the distress. Amanda, alas, could not. The last of us came in gradual, episodic spurts and then suddenly (or however that goes). I remember…
Hymn to Riches
Turns out the penthouse suite doesn’t suit me, too posh and roomy for my delicate tastes. Give me life’s honest feeling; the cold concrete and steel of burning basements; the creak of a cratered rooftop. Luxury reeks like a toxic…
The Full Package
THE FIRST EIGHT HOURS were the best eight hours, when I still believed my lusty dreams would be fulfilled. Among the Amish, where I was born and raised, and up on Northstar, where I spent the better part two years,…
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.