Author: Heavy Feather

New Flavor Town USA Poetry: “Eating Bugs” by J. Alan Nelson

They left me in the longleaf pines of Sam Houstonwith a paper sack of baloney, bread, three apples.In other years they would’ve been taken away in cuffs for abandonment. I ate it all by noon the first day. By the second morning the hunger had teeth.I watched Boy Scouts from the underbrush,their foil packets of…
Original Poem by Robert Frede Kenter: “Emergency Room (Triage)”

MD Predatory gestures encounter & shadow nothingness, curtain eye wear in pulse of organized logic. Bodies stripped of clothing reduce me to a system, structures, procedures. Anomie, anonymous, anatomic, a suggestive catalogue of science, entropic categorization of catatonic, predatory logic, a logos of systems, where humor is encountered. Brigands of Horror We have rooms to…
Fiction Review: Al Kratz Reads Luke Goebel’s New Novel Kill Dick

Readers entering the world of Luke Goebel’s new book, Kill Dick, should prepare to face the proverbial Good News and Bad News. On the downside, it’s a trip to the fall of 2016 when the “orange haze of doom” is not in the rearview mirror but instead steamrolling full speed ahead. An unfortunate stint in…
“A Wild Waltz”: Aimee LaBrie Reads Lisa Slage Robinson’s Esquire Ball: Stories from the Great Black Swamp

To dive into Lisa Slage Robinson’s 13 electric short stories in Esquire Ball is to enter a world where the women must use wit, vim, and chess-like precision to survive a legal landscape fraught with land mines of male ego, greed, and desire. While the stories shift in point of view and plot, a recurring…
“We Are Made of Other People’s Secrets”: Scott Ferry Reviews Lauren Scharhag’s Poetry Collection A Food Court in Hell

I am here to give people the good news about Lauren Scharhag, if you do not already know. She is a treasure of contemporary poetry; not only because she offers us our lost histories in vivid color and taste, but because she heals the exit and entry wounds as she works. She, in many ways,…
Haunted Passages Hybrid Work: “Dead Bear” by Ari Cordovero

In the kitchen, no one moves too quickly. Plates are set down with care. Chairs slide in small increments. A cabinet door is closed with the flat of a palm instead of a snap. Porcelain animals watch from mahogany shelves— a fox mid-pounce, a deer with glassy eyes, a white horse frozen in a permanent…
Poetry for Side A: “A Branch Where Things Went Terribly Wrong” by Salvatore Difalco

I am not a single person moving through a single story.I am a multiplicity, a sprawling bush of eventssprouting new branches. This version of me tooka left turn at the intersection. Another version tooka right turn. That version avoided the catastrophethat greeted this version shortly after makingthe ill-fated left turn. I had wanted to turn…
Haunted Passages Short Story: “Storn Williams Goes West” by Perry Genovesi

1. Tuesday Seeing what he thinks is a basketball rolling across the road at night, and then a boy in a pair of nylon gym shorts following it, Storn swerves. The Taurus veers off the asphalt and plunges into a bog. The headlights submerge into murky ink. The engine floods and the intake and transmission…
“St. Dymphna’s Miracle of Survival”: Fox Henry Frazier Reviews Hillary Leftwich’s Genre-Defiant Playbook

Poet and memoirist Hillary Leftwich’s most recent book, a genre-defiant work titled Saint Dymphna’s Playbook, is a devastating study in modalities of erasure. The book interrogates the almost unfathomably brutal erasure of female/femme voices and identities, as acts of deletion and blotting-out permeate the work via form and content. Resultingly, Saint Dymphna’s Playbook is both…