Author: Heavy Feather

New Fiction for Side A: “The Dog’s Absent Bark” by Sean Thomas Dougherty

The Dog’s Absent Bark The neighbor’s dog across the highway and the tree line barks on and off all day. She is a big dog. Some kind of Shepherd mixed with something else, out on a chain, there in the cold. But no, it isn’t that story. They bring her in when they get home…
Two Original Poems: Sarah Fawn Montgomery

This Autistic Puts on Her Mask Because the world wantsa woman smiling louder than her voice, scripts rehearsedbecause the only answer to How are you? is Finewhich is a lie like making eye contact with the centerof someone’s forehead, manufacturing smalltalk and big gestures about the world and weather,whether or not you actually care, autistic…
New Haunted Passages Poetry: “Remember When Exciting” by Daniel Edward Moore

was a murder on the outskirts of town and two hundred jawsdropped quickly to the floor as water troughs on Main Streetfilled with human tears. Horses became tender like kittensyou could ride. Sparrows sang on crime scene tape in aminor key and barns became suspicious of holding morethan hay. Known for their love of God…
The Future Has Poetry: “Water Tastes Like Metal” by David Anson Lee

The tap tastes like the factory that promised a hundred jobsand delivered a century of residue.We boil and filter and boil againuntil only the sediment remembers the river. My neighbor grows potatoes in a tub because the soil refused apologies.His hands are callused maps of a season gone wrong.Children rinse candy in bottled water and…
New for Side A: Haibun Postcard by Judson Evans

Pisgah Inn, Milepost 408.6, Blue Ridge Parkway,199 Hemphill Knob Rd., North CarolinaNov.12, 1997 Dear Numerologists, Drop a race horse, a bullfrog, or a flea from a high place,calculate the damage mass makes squared. Massive rockslides across Blue Ridge Parkway around milepost #408.Equations of chaos can’t quarry from stable sums. Steeproad cuts, planes of schist—shear stress,…
Fiction Review: Ria Dhull Reads Walter Serner’s Curious Love Story The Tigress

Some years after Walter Serner helped bring Dadaism to Zurich, he broke away from the movement. The Tigress, perhaps Serner’s most famous work, emerged in the period after Serner’s detachment from the art world, and like much of Serner’s other writing, takes place in seedy underworlds—the characters that entice him are criminals and conmen. Serner’s…
Fiction Review: Gabrielle Stecher Woodward Reads Jim Naremore’s Novel American Still Life

A pair of Nike high-tops, a stuffed rabbit, a vinyl suitcase, a laminated graduation photo framed with dried marigolds: these common yet intimate relics are the defining features of descansos. These roadside memorials created on the occasion of someone’s tragic and untimely death are the subject of photojournalist Skade Felsdottir’s big break. As “one of…
“Evil Was Real”: Matthew Kinlin & Nicholas Rombes Discuss His Novel The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing

Released just over a decade ago, the mystery of The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing from Nicholas Rombes only deepens. In the mid 90s, a journalist tracks down and interviews a rare film librarian who once burned a stockpile of film cannisters and disappeared for many years. The head-twisting neo-noir follows Laing’s descriptions of these…
New Side A Haibun Postcard: Judson Evans

Pittsburgh, PA – Warhol Museum,Aug. 17, 1997 Dear Connoisseurs and Collectors— Surprised to discover Warhol had his very own Museum-mausoleum. That he came from a real place, thought maybe hewas a breech birth from a Campbell’s “Tomato Rice” soup can.Always hated the way rice grains looked bloody. I didn’t know he’dbeen shot again and again:…