Hunger Mountain Pushcart Nominations for 2011
Accidental Pugilism
an essay 
by Richard Farrell
Visit with Richard Farrell
My first diagnosed seizure occurred in the cockpit of a Navy T-34C Mentor, on a formation flight over Pensacola, Florida. I was twenty-three. Another pilot flew the ‘lead’ aircraft that day, and I was the ‘wingman…’
Black Bear
fiction 
by Heather E. Goodman
Black bear rouses from hibernation at the end of April when I summon her. She emerges from her den by the cedar grove behind my childhood home in Tower, Minnesota where as teenagers, Mac and I made love. Weary from the long winter, she heads south to the Twin Cities. She cuts through clusters of budding birches under silver moonlight and labors through swampy cattails in honeyed sunrises. She gobbles fronds, catkins, and shoots to feed her empty belly.
Death By Pufferfish
fiction
by Mayumi Shimose Poe
Visit with Mayumi Shimose Poe
The torafugu was in his mouth. It was slippery-smooth—tsuru-tsuru, Kazuo recalled the term—so fresh it seemed to be swimming around of its own accord, milling about amongst pearly rice grains. Expect a resilient chewiness, he thought as he closed his jaws onto the flesh. Open, close, open. Not exactly slippery—kind of slimy, but the rice was familiarly comforting. The taste will be as subtle as the fragrance of spring rain, as pristine as the water flowing over a river stone flanked by a virgin forest. Close, open, throat tickle. Long pause, but grandfather was looking at him. So, close, open, swallow. The bite of fish was still largely whole when it went down his throat. It stung as it went. Stray rice grains required a second swallow. And even then, the stubborn fish tried to swim back up, like a stupid salmon with the urge to spawn.
A Numbered Sequence: To the Figures of Horses in the Cave of Chaudet-Pont-d’Arc, After Seeing Werner Herzog’s Documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams
a poem 
by Nancy Eimers
1) Would you have dreamed your way so sweetly into this life beneath a flashlight’s shine? Or spotlit by a movie crew, the grandiloquent voice of Werner Herzog musing over the brush held in a human hand 30 or 33 thousand years ago? So, do you think the findings in this cave show the birth of the human soul?
Flow
a poem
by Bradley Harrison
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in the cracks in the mud / in the dried up / creek
bed we buried / you six months silent / again in metastatic
burning / this is the part where you / fall in a moment
into all / the same sounds into…
Our Heron
a poem
by William Olsen
Observation isn’t serious play. It is living serious. Same heron. It’s used to us, we are as twilight. When we walk down shore. Hand me the binoculars. I’ll hand them back. No I can see it with my naked eye. Cup your ear. Drink what I say…
