Author: Heavy Feather

  • Three Haunted Passages Flash Fictions: Becca Yenser

    Three Haunted Passages Flash Fictions: Becca Yenser

    Tornadic Weather The Midwest throws neon-colored food at us. We have something microscopic in our throats. The trees procreate with pink, twirling helicopters that Carmen decides are magical. We go to a festival about a truce, called Truce Fest. We are trucing about colors of skin. You find a pair of earrings. Everything is pink…

  • “Neither Fish Nor Fowl”: A Short Story by Yunya Yang

    “Neither Fish Nor Fowl”: A Short Story by Yunya Yang

    He knows my name, my real name. Not Katie. Katie is my English name. I came up with it so that people wouldn’t have to be stumped by a name that starts with an “X.” During the uncomfortable pause as people stare at my real name, I will add, “I go by Katie, by the…

  • “Inside Endless Epidemics in America” – Four Quartets: Poetry in the Pandemic, a Tupelo Press anthology edited by Kristina Marie Darling & Jeffrey Levine, reviewed by Amy Strauss Friedman

    “Inside Endless Epidemics in America” – Four Quartets: Poetry in the Pandemic, a Tupelo Press anthology edited by Kristina Marie Darling & Jeffrey Levine, reviewed by Amy Strauss Friedman

    As of this writing, over 420,000 Americans have died from Coronavirus, to say nothing of the suffering of millions of others. “They died breathing the country that failed them. They died without the hands that should have held them at the last breath. They died in nobody’s arms,” Rachel Eliza Griffiths tells us, a truth…

  • Six Flavor Town USA Poems by Eddie Kim

    Six Flavor Town USA Poems by Eddie Kim

    Untitled(With Final Line from Roethke) An elegant and corpulent diner in Costco sweatsis dancing at this buffet—the way chopsticks can place piecesof amaebi in a mouth while pinching offtheir tails … The choir of heads keeps watch from a separate plate.The docking is smooth, decisive. Like a figure skater in practicehitting all the jumps. A…

  • In the Awakening Season, a Tupelo Press / Leapfolio poetry collection by Matthew Mumber, reviewed by David Epstein

    In the Awakening Season, a Tupelo Press / Leapfolio poetry collection by Matthew Mumber, reviewed by David Epstein

    “If medicine were my spouse,” Matthew Mumber posits, “I would ask politely / if we could have a long-overdue chat.” It’s possible to understand many of these poems as a transcript of such conversation. Mumber, an oncologist, has given us a three-part book of thirty-eight poems in some sixty pages. The strengths of this collection…

  • Ancestry, a short story collection by Eileen O’Leary, reviewed by Julia Breitkreutz

    Ancestry, a short story collection by Eileen O’Leary, reviewed by Julia Breitkreutz

    In her short story collection Ancestry, Eileen O’Leary invites us into the lives of characters who are searching for a sense of belonging in a world which she reveals to be often void of authentic human connection. We witness the futile attempts of an over-eager college student in “Adam,” as he desperately tries to form…

  • Two Haunted Passages Poems by Adam Strauss

    Two Haunted Passages Poems by Adam Strauss

    Stylus Harbinger of what’s to come and what’s coming pure shitty.Peerless ditty at the end of JuneWhen the swans are all out biting, when the sessions on PlatonicThought break out in hives we could have dusted.No-one ever trustedThe gramophone because it had a ticFor only playing the truth, and the truth like carapaces strewnAcross a…

  • “The Human in Me”: A Haunted Passages Nonfiction Essay by Amanda Gaines

    “The Human in Me”: A Haunted Passages Nonfiction Essay by Amanda Gaines

    The room was stacked floor to ceiling with antique dolls. It was the summer of my senior year of high school. Outside, August summer heat dissipated like mist off the sidewalk. Elm trees kneeled over the back porch of the small mansion. Their leaves were tinged with red and orange, a reminder. September was nearby.…

  • Three Flash Fictions: Andrew Tran

    Three Flash Fictions: Andrew Tran

    Moniker My “friends” kept calling me, Asian. And I was Asian, I am Asian. But they called me Asian as if it were my name. Like it was on my birth certificate, like I’d put it on a resume, or end a love letter that way, or even put it on my tombstone. At first,…