Author: Heavy Feather

Begat Who Begat Who Begat, short stories by Marcus Pactor, reviewed by Maxwell Malone

Marcus Pactor’s sophomore short story collection, Begat Who Begat Who Begat, explores the deceptively complex topics of mundanity and domesticity through experimentation in both rhizomatic storytelling and narrative form. Over the course of the collection’s 122 pages, Pactor presents 17 stories situated just left of reality. Across varying subjects, such as a toilet that transmutes…
Fiction for Side A: “Feast” by Andrea Marcusa

Feast The double-wide steel door clanks shut. I stand next to the man who collected me from the waiting room. We are the only people in the huge elevator. I am naked except for my thin gown. The man barely looks at me. He rolls back on his heels and digs his hands into his…
Side A Short Story: “Adults Told Me” by Mark Benedict

Adults Told Me 1. My science teacher told me that life was slapdash. I talked to him after class sometimes; science was one of the few subjects in high school I was interested in. “God’s plan my butt,” Mr. Burke said, slurping coffee. “Evolution is flukier than the weather. Would a divine plan really include…
Poetry for Side A: “Dear Cut-Glass” by William Erickson

Dear Cut-Glass, It’s been longerthan I thoughtthis trail of bloodwould go, butthe mountain isso much smallerat its peak thanwhen we drewthose picturesinto the duston your windshield.Do you still have it,the baby we madefrom all thoseleftover dinnerconversations?Remember, wenamed it Alice andcalled your parentswith the news butno one answered.The sky is fallingis a thing we’d saywhen it…
“My Dog Is That One”: Angelo Maneage Interviewed by Zach Savich

“It felt right to be coughing on the ground,” Angelo Maneage tells us in The Improper Use of Plates, his remarkable chapbook of poems. His work is rich with that kind of off-kilter “rightness.” They get “horny in a different way,” slide on their stomachs, crawl around, cough up transmissions that flicker like a “blue bubble…
An Encyclopedia of Bending Time, a memoir by Kristin Keane, reviewed by Shannon Wolf

Memoir often serves as a vehicle for a writer—a way to recall or reconfigure a period of time or a memory. For Kristin Keane, these recollections in An Encyclopedia of Bending Time allow her to rebuild her late mother’s image, and to thin the new space between them. Grief is omnipresent here. Grief is a…
Peter Valente: Notes on the Influence of the Work of William S. Burroughs & Brion Gysin on Certain Contemporary Writers

old armor because words are built into you – in the soft typewriter of the womb you do not realize the word armor you carry; for example, when you read this page your eyes move irresistibly from left to right following the words that you have been accustomed to. Now try breakup up part of…
Side A Fiction: “Before All That” by Lauren Woods

Before All That In the end, she sells me for only a hundred dollars. “Women in this market usually go for larger karats,” the woman at the pawn shop with the nails filed down to pink nubs tells her without blinking. She doesn’t stop to think it over, doesn’t caress my head a last time…
Haunted Passages: “The Tunnels,” a short story by Jordan Dilley

They say the tunnels were built between two wars, but no one knows for sure. To know for sure someone would have to spend time going over their construction, testing the age of the plaster, but no one spends more time there than they must. The tunnels are for hiding things, not for exploring. Everyone…