Accurate river flow forecasting is vital for flood warning and water resource management, yet hourly-scale prediction in small catchments remains underexplored despite its importance for rapid response flood control. To address this gap, this study proposes an enhanced temporal attention module xLSTM (TAM-xLSTM) model that combines temporal feature extraction with timestep-level attention to better capture dynamic variations and dependencies. Case studies in the Qiandongnan region demonstrate that TAM-xLSTM substantially outperforms baseline models during wet season forecasting at Panghai Station, reducing RMSE by 9.6%, MAE by 24.1%, and Theil’s U by 6.6%, while increasing NSE by 4.8%. These results highlight the model’s ability to improve short-term river flow prediction in complex mountainous terrain and its potential to support effective flood warning and water resource management.