Author: Heavy Feather

Four Flash Fictions: William C. Blome

Talking I’d been seeing the flashing blue and red lights coming up fast behind me, and so I was soon forced to pull over by a uniformed highway patrol person for speeding. As I groped around in the glove compartment for my registration card, I found and slipped my hand into an orange puppet that…
“Lux”: A Bad Survivalist Flash Fiction by April Bradley

Clarey sits on the toilet in the shine of the morning and studies the crotch of her panties. The liner she wore overnight shows a faint bit of color, a familiar blush that indicates the tail end of another pregnancy. Clarey hasn’t told her husband that she’s known about this one for fifty-nine days. He…
“Requiem: Fin Inn,” a Flavor Town USA poem by Avery Gregurich

for M.T. Let’s debate ovals, acoustics, the moral virtues ofcurveballs. We’ll do it loud, live, staggering atopthe trusses of the river bridge. We’ll poke our facesin front of the lights off the dam for effect. A sunfloweron the shore will serve as moderator. First we’ll finish thesefrog legs, but I’ll give you cheap smokes, sure,…
Bad Survivalist: “On Catfish,” a poem by Ryan Keeney

At nine, Dad taught me how to gut a catfish. Thick-skulled, even out of water they are survivors, known to flop and thrash for hours before succumbing to suffocation. If catfish could speak what kind of wretched pleas would drift from their cavernous mouths? The first step: nail the catfish to a board. The nail…
Three Haunted Passages Poems by Sheila Dong

fruit i adopt a cat from the shelter,then forget it in a box.the way it stareswhen i remember. the wayits head rolls off,a softened apple. noblood or rot.just another donation.on the night bus i feelsick so i get offtwo stops early to walkin the light-lack, touchingchainlink and weeds. thingsfall from branchesand roll toward me.the bus…
Matthew Feinstein: Two Fraternity Poems for Bad Survivalist

Portrait of Pledge Being Left in the Middle of Nowhere on Shrooms It’s Fall. The Pledge Master has me blindfoldedin his car. We are going somewhere. A place I hopethat’s not too hard for my mother to find. But I canalready feel the rumble of winding roads beneath me,and although I’m mostly blind, specks ofmoonlight…
“Menacing Territory”: An Interview with Olivia Cronk by Logan Berry

Olivia Cronk’s Womonster is a psychedelic exploration of the “impossibility of a coherent self.” Via several poetical modes—imagistic, confessional, gothic, and surrealist—Cronk’s language transforms as it encounters genre tropes from campy horror and detective movies. Her vivid imagination is foregrounded but firmly rooted in the material realities of working and raising her child. The book is unlike…
“Under Skin”: A Haunted Passages Short Story by Val Killpack

I lifted the veil and saw ten-thousand writhing maggots. I had found an old, white sheep lying on her side. I pulled her up and dragged her through the overgrown field and up the driveway toward the barn. She collapsed on the pavement. This was the first incident. My chest convulsed, and I downed the…
Miscellaneous Language novel excerpt by Pablo D’Stair

I KEPT THE ONE DRAWER of the desk, the one third down or second up, depending how your mind works, arranged rather meticulously, this in contrast to the other drawers of the rather hulking thing – drawers in two rows to either side of the chair. The two large drawers, these in the row nearest…