Author: Heavy Feather

“THE PRISON FORECAST”: Excerpted from Agitprop for Bedtime: Polemic, Story Problems, Kulturporn and Humdingers by Charles Holdefer (Sagging Meniscus Press)

A portable collection of polemical bedtime stories for adults, addressing such timely topics as: erectile dysfunction during the national anthem, what happens when Nancy Pelosi comes calling, and what Model A Fords say under certain conditions. THE PRISON FORECAST “Welcome, Tim!” “Great to be on the show, Jill!” “So—what’s your outlook on today’s prison market?”…
“We Followed the Goldfinches”: A Bad Survivalist Short Story by George L. Hickman

The year that Jack and I rejected everything man-made, we drove into the mountains. Our 2010 Corolla was man-made, but we didn’t mind that. Its low hum encased us, carrying us through rolling hills. How strange to plunge into our new life in the outdoors from behind the walls of a sturdy metal tube. How…
Ben Segal: “Hungry Ghosts,” a Haunted Passages flash fiction

Ghosts eat ghost hamburgers from ghost cows. You can’t kill a ghost though, so the ghost cows are eaten piece by piece, fog slabs sliced off their lowing bodies. Such practices of piecemeal slaughter flourished in the time before refrigeration and were banned as cruel by Kosher law. Ghosts are in this way heretical, or…
Haunted Passages: “Pocket Scalpel,” a one-act play by Nathan Dixon

Cast of Characters C: A 32-year-old college counselor living in Durham, NC. Over the past several years she has been dealing with the news that she carries the BRCA-2 Breast Cancer Gene. She must undergo an array of preventative screenings every six months, knowing full well that in the (not too distant) future she will…
“After the Hot Dog Eating Contest,” a Flavor Town USA poem by Avery Gregurich

for Dean Young I too have to start with a bite out of the middle part, the place in the record that isn’t music. Sweet drooling bits of black vinyl back onto the platter of hot dogs, waiting, patient between Surf and Stillwell, Coney Island. How do you take your dog to the vet without…
“Creamer”: A Personal Essay for Bad Survivalist by Marlene Olin

I’m not a demanding person. All I need is my morning cup of coffee. Plus a teaspoon of sugar and a little creamer. Fuck! I’m out of creamer. My fingers dance on the keyboard, and I can’t believe my luck. The creamer’s coming. Not in five days or six but today. But the driver no habla…
“An Offering of Space”: An Essay for Bad Survivalist by Whitney Kerutis

My body wakes me one morning as a crater collecting water. I ring out the stiffness, twisting my torso left and right. Keep my eyes shut. Hold myself like a spouse whose body is easy to swallow. * One morning, a woman seated two rows ahead of me on the bus tries to find the…
“Outside of Our Conscious Control”: PK Eriksson Interviews Donald Platt

One illuminated Letter of Being is a sequence of poems—by turns lyric, narrative, and dramatic—that limn what it means for a son to watch and be fully present as his mother prepares to die. These poems are about living in the midst of death and about dying, “while everything is coming into bloom.” Donald Platt…
Michael Sikkema Haunted Passages Poem: “How to Be a Haunted House”

1 After the first rainshove up what’s beenburied in the flowerbedsThe teeth. The toy trucksThe steak knife 2 Use yourfaceto bendthe others 3 Bleed brighter 4 Stay inthe sharp partof the storyuntil it hurtsright. Findthat smallvoice andstretch it 5 Fog the changes 6 Manifest your walkersin earlier clothes 7 No neon 8 No fanny packs…