Author: Heavy Feather

Haunted Passages: Four Poems by Oleg Olizev

The Fire You Fed You, with your violent inclination,shattered my stove.Now my oven of love is broken,my cranberry juice blooms across the kitchen tiles,staining the grout like evidence.You called it passion.I call it wreckage. You stuffed rice pudding into the wound,as if its sweetness could cover your crimes.Instead of making love, you used me—your hands,…
Three Original Poems by Eleanor Levine

What the Legendary Do Abbie Hoffman says “rich kids do heroin”Springsteen plays pool with my brotherBob Dylan snores at an A.A. meetingToni Morrison is a postage stampLiz Smith disparages my researchGrandpa Munster makes sexist remarksChairman Mao doesn’t brush his teethStalin kisses you in the East VillageHitler taps me at the Exxon stationJohn Goodman argues in…
Fiction Review: Al Kratz Reads Ruyan Meng’s Novel The Morgue Keeper

Ruyan Meng’s The Morgue Keeper is an intense book, maybe more so than any book I’ve read since Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Across 200 pages and 27 chapters, it tells the story of Qing Yuan, a morgue keeper trying to survive China’s Cultural Revolution in the summer of 1966. Essentially assigned to clean dead bodies…
New Fiction for Bad Survivalist: “EDC” by Kent Kosack

Lesser men leave the house without sparing a second, third, or 464th thought for what they carry. Without a plan, a backup plan, a backup plan should the backup plan prove itself wanting. Not him though. He’s equipped for all contingencies. Prepared. Properly outfitted. Carry for the life you want, not the life you have—that’s…
Poetry for Haunted Passages: “Solitude” by Grace Lynn

This poem pushes off from a riverbank,disturbing wild geese dozing in the current and is chased by a crowd of thrashing,hollering kids. They want to hold it in sight before it goes out into the tides,in its trail an incisioninto the water. The waves like twopages rising.I walk on planks that crackunder my bones but carry themto a path that…
Haunted Passages Short Story: “Pileups” by Andrew Graham Martin

Talking himself into a heart attack, Moses found, was easier than bending a spoon with his mind, which he’d tried without success to do for months in his youth. His mom had bought him Uri Geller’s book on psychokinesis as a consolation prize for not receiving a letter to Hogwarts on his eleventh birthday, and…
“In Search of Lost Monsters”: Adam M. Rosen Reads Chelsea Sutton’s Novella Krackle’s Last Movie

Being a documentary filmmaker is a bit like trying to play God. They must embark on an agonizing process of creation, sifting endlessly through old interviews, letters, journals, and other raw archival bric-a-brac, cutting and reassembling the disparate bits and pieces until they merge into a single coherent narrative. The reward is that, under the…
Side A Poetry: “The Tick Before” by Nadia Kalman

The Tick Before Before you were a fat brown tickdarkening my doorstepYou were a sad girl in a braid, in a pictureLooking out the frame for someone who would helpBut no one came. Then you had me. Others might say you are being cruelBut mom, I doubt that even Others, even youcould have predicted what…
Fiction Review: Kymberli Roberson Reads Dana Diehl’s New Collection The Earth Room

Dana Diehl takes us on a journey very few undertake in life in her short story collection, The Earth Room. It’s one of feminist self-discovery, of magical realism, the inherent organic bond between mankind and nature regardless of age, and the human psyche. This journey challenges not only the characters populating the stories themselves, but…