Author: Heavy Feather

From Vol. 9: “Dear Editor Who Sent Me a Rejection Letter on Christmas, or Essay That Ends in a Fugue” by Sean Thomas Dougherty

At first I was like for real, man. Really? But then I immediately thought of my coworker Wayne, whose wife died a few years ago near Christmas, and what dismal days the holidays are for him, each colored light blinking on every house a stop light for this life, a demarcation, a calling back to…
From Vol. 9: “A Miniature Tale of Motherhood,” a short story by Oliver Zarandi

My children are cruel and look like goblins. Every day they take something away from me and I don’t ask for anything in return. I asked them this morning, “What do you want for lunch?” “Your breasts,” they said. So they had them. They suckled my teats, one apiece, and sucked them dry. No more…
From Vol. 9: Four Poems by Emily Blair

An IUD Is a Silver Bullet That Could Kill Me so I’m not taking recommendations at this time.Instead this body is as this body doessmoke sometimes. I quit and quit quitting. In the dark of a power outage,I live alone and lie awake in the silence of a thousand people panickinginside our little homes, 5…
Two Poems from The Future: Jessica Morey-Collins

The Day We Learned Most of us immediately pulled off our shoes and popped our shirt-buttons, released the thunder of our hearts to quarrel with the administration. The teenagers who found it had been up to teenage no-good—pushing each other in a stolen shopping cart, gulping begged beer and whooping through the sidewalked night. They…
Three Poems from The Future: Caely McHale

Mona Lisa My hands are the last human thing about me.I keep my fingernails pink.I arrange them soft like the Mona Lisa. I imagine delivering a baby, scaled and cold.Scoop the mucus from his throat!My hands are the last human thing about me. My brother’s hands have gone to shit,Dark and spotted from a magnified…
Funeral for Flaca, an essay collection by Emilly Prado, reviewed by Jamie Moore

One thing I learned right away from Funeral for Flaca, is that we can trust Emilly Prado with the playlist. She earns this credibility with the playlist-inspired structure of the book, each chapter named after a song that represents that moment her in life. And if you feel like I feel about playlists, you know…
Haunted Passages Fiction: “A Haunted House” by Mark Lamoureux

I.The Master Bedroom Not the heart of the House, but its crimson mouth. The undone belt droops like a skein of slobber over the bloodred cilia of the shag carpet, the cracked-open geode of a bad lung. Faerie lights gestate in the Negroni-colored teardrops of sick lamps. Spread across a dark wood dresser are pen knives &…
Pine, a poetry collection by Julia Koets, reviewed by Carolyn Oliver

Pine, winner of the Michael Waters Poetry Prize, is the second book of poems by Julia Koets (author of Hold Like Owls and The Rib Joint: A Memoir in Essays). Grounded in the woods, fields, and shores of the South, these poems chart the love between women, by custom and necessity long kept secret. Pine…
The Prince of Mournful Thoughts, a story collection by Caroline Kim, reviewed by Philip Clapper

The stories in Caroline Kim’s collection The Prince of Mournful Thoughts all relate in some way to Korea, Koreans, or the Korean diaspora. Each story has a unique viewpoint character. The wide range of stories are often quite personal, the principal conflicts primarily having to do with familiar or other personal relationships. The pieces are…