Author: Heavy Feather

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…
New Fiction for Flavor Town USA: “Between Now and Forever” by D. Harlan Wilson

I had never stolen anything in my life, not even as a child. I received no guidance from good parents, and to this day, my moral compass remains an elemental lump of shit. Taking things that weren’t mine simply never occurred to me. When I saw the booth, I had to have it. The color,…
“Ode to Howard”: Four Poetic Cloudforms by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Translated by James M. Kopf)

When the godhead, Camarupa, noble and high,flickers through the air, heavy and spry,gathers the folds of the veil, only them to toss,to enjoy the change of shapes, their loss,now gaze upon them, firm, and, as a dream away,astonished, do not trust the eyes, for they betray. Now the slight move of a power its own,develops…
New Side A Essay from Raymond de Borja: “, I mistake things for other things,”

“Writing ethnography offers the author the opportunity to encounter the Other ‘safely,’ to find meaning in the chaos of lived experience through retrospectively ordering the past. It is a kind of Proustian quest in which the ethnographer seeks meaning in events whose significance was elusive while they were being lived. Dorrine Kindo, ‘Dissolution and Reconstitution…
Three Flavor Town USA Poems by Joseph Verhelle

The micro-economics of a (really big) caramel apple A student gave me a caramel applefor Christmas, it was plumpand made by her grandmotherwith love. I was eating it in my classroomwith the doors closed,hovering over a trash canlike a rat. I didn’t pack anything else for lunchand the law of diminishing returnsdeclared that soon, the…
Original Short Comic for Side A: “My Life” by Dominik Slusarczyk

Mini-interview with Dominik Slusarczyk HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)? DS: Early on in my writing career I wrote a poem called “Grey Fish Sea.” The poem is strange but beautiful. Every time I write I try to emulate what I did with that poem.…
Poetry Review: Josh Nicolaisen Reads Stacey Waite’s Collection A Real Man Would Have a Gun

Stacey Waite’s A Real Man Would Have a Gun is as jarring and interrogative as its title signals. The poet’s newest release is highly autobiographical and features speakers who often find themselves somewhere between genders while society attempts to place a singular label upon them. Waite’s poems invite us to see the fluidity of gender,…