Author: Heavy Feather

“Cordyceps,” a flash essay by Sher Ting

Did you know cordyceps colonizes the bodies of carpenter ants, chemically hypnotizing them to ascend to the highest point in the environment before releasing a mushroom cloud of spores? I have been told a hundred useless facts, with bread and a butter knife on the train to Oslo. The man next to me, knotted in…
Bad Survivalist Poetry: “where the space ends” by Anthony Santulli

even maps know that point of view is a lifeless music—that the next sense to evolve will only create further desire to escape from experience at intermission, the utterance of terms we barely notice (these things happen in the cracks, their particular hiss) …
From Vol. 9: “In My Dreams There’s No One in the Maternity Ward,” a poem by Tessa Livingstone

I keep having dreams they take her from mewhen I hadn’t finished. I wanted her more. I wander halls in search of nurses. Babies.Their open mouths. Their frantic chantings. Nothing stirs here—only the peahenwho roosts in tall open trees, scratches at leaf litter, preens brown plumage. A listless planet in orbit,gravitating in and out of…
“Picking,” a collaborative short story by Kim Magowan & Michelle Ross from Vol. 9

I’m picking lemons from the lemon tree beside the back porch of a man I met a week ago at a fundraiser for the local cat shelter. Cocktails and Cats. I was mostly there for the cocktails, Josh was mostly there for his ex-wife, Maggie. She’s one of the shelter’s directors. “She’s my best friend,”…
From Vol. 9: “from The Self Is Being Thought,” poetry by Amie Zimmerman

III. presented with the frameworkof fevers, faith, moonlight and such other violencean obvious definition of self I amnot ready to acceptI, predictably, am violentin my plunge to sleep greedy the dried-up bird bath I steady refuseto clean out and fillthe mock orangethat either smells like grape Kool-Aidor jasmine tea depending on how soberyou think I…
From Vol. 9: “birthday poem” by Patrick Kindig

today there are marigoldsblooming in the street& i mean this literally.there are marigolds risingfrom the seam betweenthe curb & the pavement,twelve of them, marigoldsappearing unexpectedlywhere no marigolds shouldbe. today there are marigoldsblooming in the street & iam a little bit older, a littlemore likely to diewithout warning. i am older& more likely to die withoutwarning…
Three Poems by Anat Zecharia (Translated by Tsipi Keller) from Vol. 9

Lust Nothing is more useless than Godhe doesn’t stroke my foreheaddoesn’t stretch a moist tongueto lustfully lick the bloodfrom every high hill and every mountain peakand under every green tree.[1]Most of the time I divine the innerparts of his body(his sharp resinous odor riseslike the odor of sex)find him in the blue reflecting from the…
Two Poems by Eddy Jordan from Vol. 9

Theatre for Realtors An afternoon for burning, we lookin houses.A chance to makesome theatre for realtorswe say, realtorsare people too we think.We talkloud, walk wide, itch our invisible beards together. What do you think honey? It’s nice, I mean, but the kitchen? Kitchens can be redone. Sure, but— The lighting is nice. The lighting is—…
Two Fictions by Teague von Bohlen from Vol. 9

Bombs in Dogs My ex Shelly and her new husband are moving out of town, a little over an hour’s drive from here. It’s a planned community on what’s now a golf course, but the whole thing used to be the municipal airfield back before the regional airport went in. They say they’ve treated the…