Author: Heavy Feather

Bad Survivalist: Three Little Things by Leigh Chadwick

Skinny Kids Skinny kids touching light with their tongues pressed against the sun. Skinny kids with half their teeth gone. Skinny kids with an assembly line of ribs and souls and hearts and sometimes lungs, and mostly always earlobes. Skinny kids watching a dodo run a lemming off a cliff. Skinny kids with half their…
The Reincarnations by Nathan Elias, a story collection from Montag Press, reviewed by Pedro Ponce

The elevator pitch version of this review might read something like “Twin Peaks meets Raymond Carver.” In his debut story collection, Nathan Elias reveals the strangeness just beneath the surface of milieus often associated with gritty realism: hotels, hospital rooms, “a bar in Seminole Heights called Hole in the Wall.” These nondescript locales are the…
Flash Fiction: “Going In” by Kim Farleigh

“I was able,” James said, “to ignore it until yesterday; but last night, it was just impossible.” Sitting on his bed’s edge, he shook his head. I was lying on another bed, my head on a pillow, his head slowly shaking. A ceiling light turned our room’s window black. A vehicle’s drone outside rose then…
J Pascutazz: Three Poems from The Future

Is There Life for Us Outside the Dome City? The dome sky blackened like her mood ringleaving precious few hours for the sundialto shadow a number. Time to blow the conchand gather together the herdThey’ll stand like statues in a sanctuaryuntil they’re all mossy and patinated She was glad to take off her forest-green patinaAnd…
I Will Not Name It Except to Say by Lee Sharkey: A Poetry Review by Robert Dunsdon

Young poets, hotheads newly converted and ablaze with ideas, crane their necks and clear their throats, eager for their song to be heard above all, while others further advanced polish their craft and are keen to cultivate an identity. They each have an insistent urge to tell of a discovery, a mystery, a moment of…
And Then the Gray Heaven, a novel by RE Katz, reviewed by Lillian Barfield

And Then the Gray Heaven by RE Katz centers around Jules, a queer young adult who has emerged from foster systems and displaced homes, and chronicles their journey as they deal with the quick and unexpected death of their partner, B. While B’s family disapproves of the relationship, Jules finds their own way of dealing…
A Review of Alice Kaltman’s Dawg Towne by Alexandra Pennington

Alice Kaltman’s novel Dawg Towne features interchangeable narrative perspectives among six members of the tiny suburban Towne who each offer a different glimpse into the rich and complex connections made between man and canine. The central conflict of the novel features a young dognapper; she believes she is a social justice warrior who is saving…
A Story from The Future: Leland Cheuk’s “Frontliners”

I shuddered after Rebecca said she’d ordered takeout and toilet paper again. I was getting nowhere with my intramarital campaign for self-sufficiency during the global pandemics. No android dependency! I get why the Feds and L—, Inc. teamed up to deploy legions of androids to do deliveries and frontline tasks so we could all stay…
“I want a new car, I told you.” a Side A prose poem by Hannah Grieco

I want a new car, I told you. but what I want is to smash the windows of our minivan, to take the chainsaw out of the shed, to push the ignition and hear it sputter and forget for a moment how to run before coming to life, to feel it growl in my hands,…