Freight
v.
1. To inscribe, write or otherwise make marks that are to be read (more properly, read back) in non-linear fashion. To write a text that is both an Eulerian trail and a magic square.
2. To mumble from the heart.
3. To tabernacle under the umbels. To retire to the weeds to mildew the saccharine and honey the piquant. To waft and yet achieve something akin to harmony. If words could sing under their own sway, how they might.
n.
1. A term of venery for forgotten things. A freight of them, tugging or leaping phosphenic away from the center of gaze. How long is it now?
2. What was that?
3. I dreamed I was younger than the family dog, again.
4. It was doll-like, hot water bottle-ish, foiled in the guise of a fetish, an undergarment-esque membrane disclosing air via candied spectra. That is, an instant deflation free of the explosive.
Plural
adj.
1. The first breath of air was tacky in the lungs: barbecue sauce on jackfruit, or dirty fingers flipping pages. The paper “Yee-haws” against the eye’s progress and how it tracks the brain’s encasing.
2. No one planned the vacation, so its arrival has been more a grinding than a sweeping up. Glacial, if not massive. What version of us had gotten tickets on a plane, a hotel, the one nice dinner of the trip, the show, the tour of the palace? Where had we learned the kata for Walking by The River or Walking Downtown, and why did the terror only subside when it got too dark for obligation?
3. All the things you see that are a version of you.
Well
v.
1. Suffice. As in, sufficiency is only in the upward trend: the abundance that keeps growing.
2. It used to be that story was enough to patch the actual. But somehow story’s ratcheting has lost its torque. Maybe I’d forced the handle to far against the mechanism hidden in its simplicity. Or its components took to meshing too well, each gear tooth a blunt star irradiating in the blood-dark of an assumed utility. Like today, how the pilot light capitulated to a green LED and the closet reached the limit of its caring. No longer would the coats mute its incessant roaring—not that any closet wants to roar, or cannot help but defend itself otherwise. So I flipped the orange breaker. It’s switch was obese and, as it returned to its circuit-completing position, it made the sound of a diner’s paper napkin scrubbing against a stubbly chin. My arms, unarmed. My feet without the comfort of a per capita. I phoned the police, but they had to leave as soon as they arrived, The lead detective determined that the pitch everywhere around us was mere days out of warranty. So I pursued the thread. I trimmed and capped the lines’ fitful diameters. After the laundry’s heat broke, I discovered one sleeve had kneaded its nylon and lining into a supple epoxy. By closing time, the remaining doughnut had filled its crookedness with a transparency of grease. “Call me Chuck,” the emergency exit said.
Trap
adj.
1. Descriptor applied to objects in the dual, lesser world conceived in some religions. Maya, shadows on the cave wall. If you thread a fine enough path, past all the trap things, you’ve won. Sometimes you start at zero and can go negative, or get a point for each trap evasion. In this version, you start with all the points and keep losing them, Leaky Bucket.
2. Sentiment’s motility is hallmarked by a certain sludgy quality.
3. To a superficial archaeologist, “1”s could be “I”s. Then the whole house of cards pulls off a ziggurat illusion. “Poof”s could be “boob”s.
4. Trick, or to be tricked.
Music
n.
1. An archaic form of waiting (see wait).
2. We are filling one wall of our den (itself beadboard-ed, satin finished, like a glaze of ice somehow to any slapping-on other than primer) with empty frames. Empty too of glass or its euphemisms, e.g., enlarged windows of nail polish, durable fractions of clear acrylic, the notion of exemplifying itself. But not of a certain granularity, resonances wound. Yet the thin lines and notches haven’t caused the anticipated X-rays to ooze free. The house’s nerves inflame privately. We still have to listen for the stud-finder to protest. Such a monotonous old man, always complaining about the hats interfering with his view of the action, never outraged enough to complete the circuit from his finger to a stranger’s shoulder and request a kind removal. If the light doesn’t shift from green to red, does the pitch rise or fall? When we aren’t looking to look—when we are only toying with the tokens of occupation, such as forks and checkbooks—we’re slowly cognizant of a canvas both original and beyond. The opacity that is itself a frame. Shelves disappear into it; lampshades and security, too. We try and intervene with another hanging. Why not, if they are all gratuitous, all recursive, all primitive? (Remember: winding precedes folding. Flatness, like vocabulary, is acquired.) We measure from the corner or one mortise to the uterine feather of a distant tenon. Without realizing it, we’ve mastered grooming. Should we walk out that front door, we’ll encounter not birds, not stones, not cars, not jobs, not the climate’s scatterbrained bloodthirstiness. Only smiling parents so proud of us that they fail to feel the blearing of that one incisor foreshadowing a mudslide.
3. A replication that, while it may be perfectly functional and/or achieves its aim, nevertheless feels lacking.
adv.
1. Penury reaches around to the taut and nautiluses itself inside a ponytail.
2. You brought a plunger to an auger fight. Somehow, luck is still on your side. Until it folds up its podium, anyway.
Laugh
v.
1. To solve by erasing or enhancing. As in, “laughter is the best medicine.”
2. To erase with tempera, gouache, or some other non-oil-based paint, with the aim of foiling a forger. As in, “Laughing academy.”
n.
1. A swing made from a length of rope, a discarded piece of industrial equipment, a branch that can support the weight of no more than two thieves, and a confidence not strong enough to be classified as hope yet weaker than optimism.
3. A day did make a difference. Mr. Bones did slip on pie crusts. The metaphysical did ride a merry-go-round, heave, shake it off with instant wrists. A difference of a day salutes a roundabout.
2. A Joycean cheese.
Effort
n.
1. Blind or blinding effusion.
2. A contranym at the valences of pride and shame.
4. Where components may fail and there is imperfect information on whether a component has failed, then all honest components agree the faulty components do not collude together in an attempt to lure specialized fault injectors into a suboptimal strategy.
3. Pshht.
Eric Lindley is a musician, writer, and artist living in the bay area. His writing has appeared in Fence, Joyland, Tammy, and elsewhere, and other work at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Machine Project, Telic Arts Exchange, The Knitting Factory, and The Smell. With Janice Lee and Joe Milazzo, he co-edited the online interdisciplinary arts journal [out of nothing] from 2009 to 2015. You can find Eric’s work online at likeoverflowing.com.
Joe Milazzo is the author of the novel Crepuscule w/ Nellie (Civil Coping Mechanisms) and three volumes of poetry: The Habiliments (Apostrophe Books), Of All Places in This Place of All Places (Spuyten Duyvil), and, in collaboration with Eric Lindley & Miwa Matreyek, Words in Danger of Falling Out of the Vocabulary (Galileo Press). His writings have appeared in Black Warrior Review, BOMB, FENCE, Prelude, Puerto del Sol, Texas Review, and elsewhere. He is also the Founder/Editor-in-Chief of Surveyor Books. Joe lives and works in Dallas, TX, where he was born and raised. Learn more at joe-milazzo.com.
Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
Heavy Feather Review 