Miciah Bay Gault – Page 2 – Hunger Mountain Review

Where you could sit up straight

francine j harris

i have walked with half a skull and i have walked
with a blanch shell. i have walked, legs
split hungry, and i have walked too old.

Announcing 2016-17 Guest Editors and Theme

July 2016. Hello readers and writers. First off, we want to extend a special invitation: please submit for our upcoming print issue. Hunger Mountain 21: Masked/Unmasked will be out in February. We need your brilliant work now. We’re looking for poetry, children’s lit, fiction, and creative nonfiction. The theme, Masked/Unmasked, can be interpreted in myriad… Continue reading Announcing 2016-17 Guest Editors and Theme

Why I Have Hemingway Tattooed on My Forearm

David G. Pratt

“Why do you have tattoos?” I often hear.

“Because I like tattoos,” I say.

Some people understand. Some don’t. And some don’t like it…

Where I Find Myself

P.E. Garcia

I’m in Philadelphia, on my couch, next to my dog. I’m trying to write nonfiction. I have published some fiction, so I think of myself as a fiction writer. I have published some poetry, so sometimes I think of myself as a poet. I have published a few essays, but I have never….

Memories of Mr. Myers

We asked writers, editors, and educators to remember Walter Dean Myers, the author of more than 100 books, whose profound contributions to children’s literature go well beyond the printed word.

Writing the 30th Gate

Caitlyn Renee Miller

This past summer my husband, Derek, and I spent seven weeks in Mexico, where he took immersive Spanish classes, and I holed up in our rented apartment finalizing some contracted writing projects. I also spent my days trying to learn….

Things I think about while swimming.
by Hope Chernov

First Place, Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize

I swim most days after work, at first because Prescription-Happy Hindu Granny told me to, but now I look forward to it. The water has become my respite, the soft aqua antidote to my other life, the noisy Kodachrome one, where staying afloat requires more than the flimsy raft with which I’ve been equipped.

The 4-D Dog
by April Kelly

Honorable Mention, Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize

Considering the number of dog owners in America, it is safe to speculate that on any given day a small percentage of the population wakes to find an unpleasant mess on the floor, as did Dylan Carter one Thursday in March. The difference between him and the others who made such a discovery that morning is Dylan did not own a dog.

Heliciculture
by Lisa Nikolidakis

Runner-Up, Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize

Ask anyone in Greece and they will tell you the same: our snails are best. From all over they come to our village in Crete to pluck the mollusks from their swirling shells and feel the soft dissolve against their tongues.

Random Sample
by Alan Sincic

Honorable Mention, Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize

So not but a week after the funeral and this thing, this crazy thing that happens. I’m trekking through Midtown – no temp job that day – past CBS Headquarters. You know, Black Rock. You’ve seen the pictures: black as a burnt marshmallow, thirty-eight floors of granite, kind of a cross between the Tower of… Continue reading Random Sample
by Alan Sincic

Honorable Mention, Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize

Theories
by B. Boyer-White

Honorable Mention, Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize

I have a mouthful of hot tea when it hits. A boom in the walls like a wrecking ball blow, then a whole series of them, pounding. Nothing breaks but the windows snake-rattle in their frames.

Milk

Julie Cadwallader Staub

Winner, Ruth Stone Poetry Prize

This goat kicked me only once,
as if to say she knows
I’m an amateur

Pink
by Kari Smith

Runner-Up, Ruth Stone Poetry Prize

like chrysanthemums, like tulips;
like the droopy pink heads of peonies
that filled our kitchen windowsill, spilling
over mason jars and plastic cups…

Time Under a Bridge
by Lisa Breger

Runner-Up, Ruth Stone Poetry Prize

I don’t want to leave this world:
My friends are in it, and there’s so much beauty.

Tilt-A-Whirl
by Rachel Furey

Overall First Place, Katherine Paterson Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Literature

It’s just you in the Tilt-A-Whirl cart until Jimmy Miller slips in beside you. He reeks of cigarette smoke, and you want to grind an elbow into his stomach and tell him to find another cart.

The Lies And Illusions Of Lucy Sparrow
by Sharry Wright

Young Adult Winner, Katherine Paterson Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Literature

Today is the day my new life begins. One hundred and twenty-three days since we sailed from New York harbor bound for San Francisco. Seventy-one days since I buried Mother at sea.

Banu the Builder
by Mathangi Subramanian

Middle-Grade Winner, Katherine Paterson Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Literature

See her? That one, there. The one that’s always looking up up up at the tops of things? Falls in every crack in the sidewalk? Always forgetting that she’s on the ground?

That’s Banu. Banu, who is not like the rest of us.

Anglerfish: the Black Devil of the Deep
by E. M. Alexander

Picture Book Winner, Katherine Paterson Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Literature

Far, far below the ocean’s surface, where no trace of light can be seen, the deep-sea Angler fish has made her home.

In the Middle of the Night
by Catey Miller

Honorable Mention, Katherine Paterson Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Literature

Twenty-one days ago, exactly one month before Layla and I were set to move to different states for different colleges, I was lying on the couch in Layla’s family’s den, pretending to be asleep while she and her mom, Ellen, had a loud fight.

Paddy Cats
by Helen Kampion

Honorable Mention, Katherine Paterson Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Literature

Toshiko lived in a small village in Japan where the rice grew in rows as straight as chopsticks. Every day on her way to the rice paddies, Toshiko greeted the stray cats and scratched their backs.

Attack of the Giant Meatball!
by Callie C. Miller

Honorable Mention, Katherine Paterson Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Literature

When a giant meatball terrorizes the American Moon colony, twelve-year-old Jupiter and his best friend, Kraig, are recruited by Apollo Command to help track down the menace and take it out.

Congrats to Our Notables!

Congrats to Hunger Mountain authors and editors who have been named notables in Best American Essays 2015 and Best Nonrequired Reading 2015: Dionisia Morales, Notable Essay 2014 for “Homing Instinct,” published in Hunger Mountain issue 18. Allie Rowbottom, Notable Essay 2014 for “World of Blue,” published in Hunger Mountain issue 18. Hunger Mountain Online Editor… Continue reading Congrats to Our Notables!

The Hierophant

Lee Ann Dalton

Today, as soon as I draw a card and flip it over, I know it’s going to be a shakedown day, so I call the absentee line and make my voice low and slow like his when he has to speak to anyone with any degree of authority.

Bloodsport

Liz Blood

Richard, a Filipino tricycle motorbike driver, agreed yesterday to drive us from Alona Beach, where we are staying, to the Sunday afternoon cockfight just outside of Panglao. He’s a quiet man, but patient with my gaggle of questions.

Letter to my Son Jacob on his 5th Birthday

Mimi Lemay

Your dad often recounts the moment he held you first. Your hearty, solid body, your pumping fists and legs and the surprised thought, “This one is a different model”…

Stuck

Joey Franklin

I walked through the double doors of the plasma center at eleven a.m., right behind a man who looked like he’d just spent the night in his car. His hair pitched awkwardly atop his head, and his loose T-shirt hung low beneath the trim of his bomber jacket…

A B.S. in Environmental Science

Rebecca Thomas

The streetlight coming in through the blinds stripes Berto’s face. He grins, and his teeth gleam white in the darkness, transforming him into the Cheshire Cat of Ash Street. “Undie run,” he whispers.

Saturday-Night Special

Terrance Manning, Jr.

Never go down to the ground with a wrestler.

And I’d shake my head all, Right, damn right, hell right, because it felt good to know he was a tough bastard, and I’d always, since I could remember, wanted to be a tough bastard.

Total War

Richard Farrell

With all four engines turning, one Superfortress rattles the ground like an earthquake….it sounds as if the brigades of Hell have been unleashed on Guam.

Small Version of a Long Story

John James

Impalpable, transparent, a big man /
In a rabbit-coat turns twice, turns three times…

Five Poems

Lafayette Wattles

Saturdays my dad wakes beneath the still-bruised
sky. Then with number-crunching hands,

Slip Kid

Stephen Eoannou

My head is fuzzy from too much beer and too much weed. I think I hear my old man running up the stairs. Then I hear him calling my mother’s name, and I know some serious shit must be hitting the fan. The old man never runs.

The Water is Wide

Jan Lower

They were heading for the mall, to spend the last couple of hours of Saturday afternoon away from the house where they lived with the Hardisons. As foster parents went, Ford guessed, they were decent; but without kids of their own, everything they did seemed off.

White Space

Elizabeth Horneber

I want to peel apart his pockets of words, like pulling apart slices of an orange. I want to open him and watch his organs thanklessly perform. Blood, push. Lungs, grow. Heart, a machine—jerk, convulse.

El Pañuelo

Christy Bailey

The dark-haired photographer lifts his eyelids in slow motion, first taking in the brown leather buckles crisscrossing my dangling feet, then the breathable khakis, loosely bunched at the knees and pouched over my stomach. He takes in my white layering tank, thick, opaque, cut between crew and scoop neck, simple and modest per Peace Corps recommendations.

Do Not’s (For Her) and Do Not’s (For Him)

Michael Levan

Basically, do not openly enjoy anything / she cannot do. Do not seem pleased / this list is shorter and more ridiculous. She will be carrying / the weight for as long as this marriage lasts, /

What the Body Holds

Betty Jo Buro

When meditating, one is not supposed to think. But of course, the harder you try not to think, the more persistent your thoughts. Do not berate yourself for having thoughts, just observe them, notice them, and let them float by, like a slow moving cloud.

Finding A Prince: Illustrations

The illustrations in the online LOVE issue of Hunger Mountain (June 2015) are all details from Anca Sandu’s manuscript “Finding a Prince.”

The Last Car

Anne Cocroft Adams

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Anne Cocroft Adams

Lovesaw

Lam Pham

“It’s okay, Sister Frances,” Seana says. “He’s a family friend.”

“He’s Dad’s special friend,” Ciaran clarifies.

The nun looks at you with a special brand of suspicion normally reserved for prison convicts and the homeless.

Next of Kith

Jacob M. Appel

Through thirty-six years as a general surgeon at New York Episcopal Hospital—during which she extracted over two thousand gallbladders, fifteen hundred appendixes, scores of thyroid glands, three miles of small bowel, and eighty-four foreign bodies, including a tie clip left behind by a colleague—Dr. Emma Inkstable had grown increasingly skeptical of human weakness.

Pieces of Sky

Christy Lenzi

The green rippling ribbons of light in the sky look like the swirling skirts of dancing Valkyries. The moon shines, waning, but it’s still large enough to see the birch grove and my unborn sister’s tree that Father dedicated to the gods for her. The three-colored cord hangs from its boughs. I hung it there to dry after I dyed it, just as Old Aud directed, according to her dream.

Love at First Book: A Story in Verse

Sarah Tregay

Because I know everyone there—and there
are no Mockingbird-reading poets to speak of—
so I draw a mental map around my coffee shop.

The Signs

Danielle Pignataro

This isn’t one of those cheesy stories where the dog dies, and everyone cries, and then at the end everyone’s happy for one reason or another. In fact, the dog’s already dead. But why dwell on the past?

Two Poems

Neil Shepard

And charity is a spare that will spare us the night broken down.

Three Poems

Daneen Bergland

I imagined looking down at my fingers to find
they were feathers. I have been that useless.
I have felt the moon beating on our roof,

The Next Day Opened Curious Windows

Marcus Myers

Before the weight
of our thing overtook us, we undressed.

Two Poems

Matthew Hotham

The miss(ed) anticipation of needs:
a hesitance to object—or,
readiness to complain.

When Alpine

Lisa Furmanski

the eras are deep vaults, peeking and seeping beyond.
And the ridge line is the skyline is pure water.

Write Hard, Die Free: Searching for a Mentor and Finding Bob

Kevin Fedarko

Early in my career, lusting as I was to become a literary light in the nonfiction world, I realized that I desperately needed the services of a mentor. I imagined a sort of a cross between an Oxford don, a Jesuit spiritual advisor, and Dr. Phil – an uber-mentor in my mind’s eye. I pictured this person in very specific terms.

The Ultimate Troll: A Confession

Isabella Tangherlini

My name is Isabella Tangherlini, I am twenty years old, and I used to be an internet troll. It sounds like something you’d hear at a group therapy session with a twelve-step program, or maybe an episode of Dr. Phil. Either way, it’s not a very good way to introduce a person, or an essay.

Mentor & Tormentor

Neil Shepard

He’s been sober now for decades, but in the early days of his teaching career, when I was his student, he was deep into the destructive work of booze. It was a time when the ampersand was intentional & historical, Beat shorthand for every slow, tired “and” anchored to old times.

In Montaigne’s Shadow

Clinton Crockett Peters

There was always Montaigne. “Of Cannibals.” “Of Drunkenness.” “Upon Some Verses of Virgil.” The stranglehold of imperialism. Books. Thumbs. Dead fathers.

7 Deadly Sins of the Writing Life: Introduction

Cheryl Wilder with Suzanne Farrell Smith

Sin. Such a little word. Our lips are drawn together as the hiss of s escapes the lungs, struggling between teeth and tongue through friction. Ssss—the serpent’s sound.

7 Deadly Sins of the Writing Life: Envy

Suzanne Farrell Smith with Cheryl Wilder

Suzanne Farrell Smith shows us her green-eyed monster and wants us to hold a mirror to ours.

7 Deadly Sins of the Writing Life: Sloth

Cheryl Wilder

Sloth, real Sloth, is easy to recognize. Greasy hair, potato chip crumbles down the shirt, dirty dishes stacked at the sink and on the coffee table.

7 Deadly Sins of the Writing Life: Lust

Suzanne Farrell Smith

There are days when I so badly want to write, that I think I could put my infant son in his crib, close the nursery door, and let him wile away the day so I could surrender to my urge. I don’t. Of course I don’t. But sometimes I think I could.

7 Deadly Sins of the Writing Life: Gluttony

Cheryl Wilder with Suzanne Farrell Smith

While studying poetry as an undergraduate in UNC Wilmington’s Creative Writing program, I became obsessed with line breaks. I marveled at how the decision to move a word from one line to the next created suspense and anticipation in the poem. I was in love.

7 Deadly Sins of the Writing Life: Greed

Suzanne Farrell Smith with Cheryl Wilder

“Greed” comes easy to the tongue. Elizabeth Warren spoke at the Democratic National Convention about decades-old “corrosive Greed” reincarnated today in billionaires with Cayman Islands tax shelters.

7 Deadly Sins of the Writing Life: Wrath

Suzanne Farrell Smith with Cheryl Wilder

Wrath doesn’t sound fierce enough for its meaning. It starts with a liquid consonant and ends with a breeze through the teeth, and it’s comprised of a single syllable that contains the first vowel sound we teach to children.

7 Deadly Sins of the Writing Life: Pride

Cheryl Wilder with Suzanne Farrell Smith

I needed to be heard.

I was in the fifth grade in 1984, when missing children—almost always dead children—stared at me from the milk carton as I ate my breakfast.

Murderer’s Bread

Toni Mirosevich

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Toni Mirosevich

An Excerpt from Committed: A Memoir of the Artist’s Road

Patrick Ross

I catch up with her a few minutes later. She is shaded under a vine-covered trellis, standing precariously several feet up on the edge of a fountain. It appears she’s trying to capture a close-up of a cherub pouring water. She’s resting her left hand on the wet stone behind the cherub, and I imagine several scenarios that have in common a disastrous ending.

Meeting Tracy

Stefani Zellmer

I meet Tracy because she has a fuckable brother, according to Kristen. Tracy and her brother Trent go to Bishop Lynch. Kristen and I go to Liberty. They wear uniforms and study Theology. We wear whatever we want and don’t know what Theology is. At least I don’t, and I’m embarrassed for not knowing so I don’t ask.

Your Move, World

Sara Kocek

When she finally comes down the escalator, I feel like flushing myself down a toilet. I knew she was going to be pretty, but not that pretty. People standing around the baggage carousel follow her with their eyes like flowers turning toward the sun.

To the Waters

Debra Rook

Cypress, rust-water thick, knees knocking against each other in clumps of billowing muck. Snakes tangled like cut ropes looped by the current. Broad black mud with a stink so sweet you gather why the gators and deer and bear wallow in it.

22 Questions For Poets

Bruce Smith

1. The donée is the unasked for, the inescapable thing that is given to
you. For Lowell it was history, for Berryman it was the Freudian myth of
the Id, for Hughes it was forms of blackness, for Dickinson it was
devotion and skepticism. What is your donée?

Ten Rules For Writers (and an encouragement)

Bruce Smith

1. Poems – lingering and leaping.
I imagine twelve poems of depth and vision, beautiful shapes and
astonishing revisions. One assigned poem that will break us into a kind
of sobbing joy. There are no assignments, per se, but the Exemplars are
there to be used as music to play towards.

A Secret Never Told

Sandra Nickel

Lorna had never had a single sleepless night or nagging intuition about Clairmont. For as long as she could remember, she couldn’t wait to turn thirteen, so she could go there. She’d hop on a plane in New York City. Step off in Switzerland. And head to the old Abbey her great-grandmother turned into a school, high up on a cliff above Lake Geneva.

13 Black Birds Looking at Away

Jessica Melilli-Hand

The first three rosaries that ever were were black black
for grief for beauty for burnt mustard seeds and what the smoke released.
Some say the threads snapped when God and Lucifer played tug-of-war,
best two out of three. Some say God never was…

Three Poems

Peter Cooley

There’s no way you can see all six at once.
Even walking around them, they’re too much again.
Today, as always, I fasten on just one.

Reunion At Lily Point–Maple Beach

Mary Fitzpatrick

On this walk
the bones of the beach

glow. They choose their light
from moon’s candle…

Two Poems

Lauren Hilger

I as Leda loved you,

we had read the myth,

with indecorum…

When Hendrix First Heard Dylan

Cody Todd

In America, it is always
the car and the road, the gun
and the girl, the grasp beating the reach,
the inevitable death in a bank vault.

A Toast to the Ancient Poet Li Po

Susan Cohen

In gorges, gibbons howled and Li Po
drank the wine of wandering.
Forever drunk, I face rock-born moon, he sang

Two Poems

Harold Whit Williams

Some evenings, it’s the Tejano thump from a Chevy
Tricked-out, all lowdown & shit, slow slinking up

Our dead tree street, reverberating the 120 bpm
Into our thin-walled fifties bungalow. Other times

Healthy Silence

Heather Sharfeddin

Clint McCown, one of my graduate professors, once said, “The literary artist writes to tame an unquiet heart.” I was newly diagnosed with Celiac disease when I first heard those words. The decades leading up to my diagnosis were filled with chronic bone pain and insomnia, the latter of which I parlayed into writing. What else could I do at 1:00 AM, staring down the darkness with no hope of sleep?

What the Bell Says

Rebecca Bald

[av_hr class=’custom’ height=’50’ shadow=’no-shadow’ position=’center’ custom_border=’av-border-fat’ custom_width=’100%’ custom_border_color=’#1f4378′ custom_margin_top=’30px’ custom_margin_bottom=’30px’ icon_select=’no’ custom_icon_color=” icon=’ue808′ font=’entypo-fontello’ admin_preview_bg=”] A little bell is called tintinnabulum; a small shrill bell, squilla; a big one in the shape of a wide-brimmed hat, petasius; codon for a hand bell; nola for a bell that swings on the necks of dogs and the… Continue reading What the Bell Says

Rebecca Bald

Epithalamion Doused with Moonshine

Dante Di Stefano

The dead don’t bivouac by the riverside.
I reckon love ain’t two fifths consolation,
but a pint of bastard light through the gut.

Things Like These

Eric Berlin

The day my dad came back to get his stuff,
he brought a guy I’d never met, some goon
named Dirk who whispered (when my dad was off
yanking shirts from hangers in his old room)
how hard these things can be…

Kitchen Song

Emily Casey

In the kitchen, the wolves

curl down between us

among the wooden legs of chairs

where the baby crawls

The Foremost Terrestrial Biome of Unknowing

Anna Llewellyn Coe

I ask her what changes when I turn off the light
and she says, Go ahead.
I ask what else and
she says, According to whom?

The Hole I Dug

Thomas March

She chose an inconvenient time to die
but chose the warmest place there was, away
from the mossy tree where we kept her chained
for safety, so she wouldn’t run away.

Carnivore

Katrin Tschirgi

I was a gerund,
filling the holes like water for lakes.

Hallucinating Arkansas

Cody Walker

Herve was snoring—a little whir-whir on the rollaway—when Walt turned off the TV and the light. I can hear myself think, Walt thought. Or not think. I can lie here and hear myself not think. The snow outside caught his attention: it fanned out, reconvened, made circles around the neon WELCOME sign.

Pavlova

Kendall Klym

Recipe
5 jumbo egg whites, room temperature, if the room is cold and dark
1 1/4 cups caster sugar kept dry, despite dampness
scant 2 teaspoons brown malt vinegar

The Evil Eye

John Hough Jr.

Sidewinder, the kids called her, because of the way she walked, dragging her left leg, swinging herself along half sideways. A witch, they said. Boils cats and puppies to make her soup. No one knew where she lived, or how, or where she’d come from, or if she’d been born here.

The Relative Nature of Things

1 roomful of antique white wicker furniture. 3 crystal vases, Waterford. 1 hollow-base chrome sailing cleat, never used. 1 Afghan rifle, circa 1900. 1 unopened condom, packaged to look like a matchbook, circa 1947. “We have to stop,” Margaret says. “Why?” “Because I haven’t gotten anything I’ve wanted.” It’s the autumn after our father’s death,… Continue reading The Relative Nature of Things

of camouflage.

Edges

David Cooke

I don’t know where to start. Far before the moon pulled the tide
to your chin. Before your groin became a grotto. Before the brine
washed away the haloes your feet squeeze into the sand.