Vasectomy

Carol Tyx

The teacher did not like the poem,

but seemed unable to say why, his face

seeping dismay or disgust.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Three Poems

William Olsen

Wherefore the marram grass settled the land there also sprang the children who are as the sand in the sea, and houses on stilts as good as gone.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Two Poems

Majda Talal Gama

I’ve seen you in souks that spill with people,

On streets that reek of three continents,

Found you filling cut-glass crystal with the scent

Of nine woods and the rose petals of three cities.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Two Poems

Michael J. Pagán

Unghost, the leftover residue across the surfaces of
the sea, after a receding
wave or a skimming of the hands. The present has no

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Faces at the Window

Sara Schaff

Our house was too big. It dwarfed me and my mother, who cried every year when we received the first winter heating bill.

Published
Categorized as Fiction

Two Poems

Frannie Lindsay

What else is she ever going to be
but one of the wind’s outgrown costumes
stuck in the swingset’s tangled chains

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Old Bull in the Road

Matt Yurdana

Some admire the old bull’s cracked horns and peeling hooves, the second skin of ancient

mud as wrecked and crumbling as this narrow road

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Two Poems

Gary Moore

I wanted the prize but the prize looked the other way
It was the other prize…

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Three Poems

Laura Budofsky Wisniewski

You can dress my naked genome up.
You can teach it art and poetry,
but it will pace the corners of the night
grunting, ‘Something else. There’s something else.’

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Companion

Annie Lighthart

The body keeps us ordinary. It says Sleep, and we must,
it says Eat, and we do.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

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

Published
Categorized as News

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.

Published
Categorized as Et Cetera

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

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.

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.

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.

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

[av_hr class=’custom’ height=’50’ shadow=’no-shadow’ position=’center’ custom_border=’av-border-fat’ custom_width=’100%’ custom_border_color=’#372a55′ custom_margin_top=’30px’ custom_margin_bottom=’30px’ icon_select=’no’ custom_icon_color=” icon=’ue808′ font=’entypo-fontello’ admin_preview_bg=”] When people say there aren’t any accidents I just feel kind of sorry for them, the way you might feel about newborn rabbits, so defenseless and ignorant about everything. But the people who say things like that are usually people… Continue reading The Last Car

Anne Cocroft Adams

Published
Categorized as Fiction

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.

Published
Categorized as Fiction

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.

Published
Categorized as Fiction

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.

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?

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,

Published
Categorized as Poetry

Two Poems

Matthew Hotham

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

Published
Categorized as Poetry

When Alpine

Lisa Furmanski

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

Published
Categorized as Poetry

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.

Published
Categorized as Et Cetera

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.

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.

Published
Categorized as Et Cetera

Murderer’s Bread

Toni Mirosevich

[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=”] Whatever time it is—morning, noon, or long into the night—our neighbor lady is always three sheets to the wind. Maybe four. We’re out in the front yard trying to dig a hole in the rock-hard ground to plant our first… Continue reading Murderer’s Bread

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.

Published
Categorized as Fiction

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?

Published
Categorized as Et Cetera

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.

Published
Categorized as Et Cetera

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…

Published
Categorized as Poetry

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.

Published
Categorized as Poetry

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

Published
Categorized as Poetry

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?

Published
Categorized as Craft

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

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

Published
Categorized as Poetry