Author: Heavy Feather

“Sour Candy”: A Haunted Passages Flash Fiction by Lindy Biller

My mother carried bright colored candies with her everywhere. Usually Skittles or M&M’s. It didn’t strike me as odd until years after she was gone. She would stop at a red light and reach into the Ziploc bag in her pocket. She created her own complicated meaning system for each color—red meant turn back, green…
How It Looks Away from Here, a Ravenna Press poetry collection by Joan Fiset, reviewed by Robert Dunsdon

A girl, around eight or nine years old perhaps, and tightly wrapped up against the cold, stands motionless on a small trampoline. She got here having walked on duckboards across an uneven and muddy yard from what looks like a shabby barn. Who she is and what she represents, if anything, is anyone’s guess; she…
Sara Quinn Rivara: “Instructions for Surviving the End of the World,” a hybrid piece for Bad Survivalist

x The road to Mouth Cemetery is gravel, hardly a road. Runs past a falling-down yellow farmhouse, three air conditioners thrumming in the windows, a sign nailed to a dead oak: trespassers will be shot! The road slips into beech-maple woods, becomes dirt, then disappears into long grass. Over the dune, Lake Michigan sluiced the…
Flavor Town USA Fiction: “Dangerous Soup” by Alicia Bones

Diner comment cards from The Wild Boar: “The soup’s the only thing I ever order because it’s the only food I dream about. Why do you have anything else on the menu? The soup’s the only thing anybody wants.” —Addie R. “It’s fabulous. He’s outdone himself. This is the best soup we’ve ever had!” —The…
Fred Gerhard: Four Poems for Haunted Passages

Chill November On a chill November afternoonmemory of colorclings to skylike pitch dark twigs alivereaching for a summer sunlong gone a poorly dreamt expanseof slate fogpearly mistfar away and departingour livesour graves leaves space forautumn hymns in thelow quiet tonethat falling breezesknowand hum where we would gobefore we let goand throwour shivering limbs aliveto the…
Flavor Town USA: Five Capsicum Poems by Steven Ray Smith

Tabasco I repeatI was not named afterthat vinegary tincture you sluice upon your cackleberries You and I have not metbut let me say to you tooit was named after meAnd let me give you some advice Copyright patent and trademarkyour quirky relish and the cut of your compact jibbefore the patrons and partygoersand those with…
Flavor Town USA Fiction: “Cake Every Day” by Mike Lewis-Beck

Liam finds himself at a crossroads. His wife, Carla, has exiled him from their comfortable Iowa home, and he’s seeking solace in Oregon—Portland, to be exact, where he, a fifty-year-old Professor of Poetry, has secured a lowly visiting appointment at a local college. While that is a crossroads for him, it is not the crossroad. That crucial…
Regard novel excerpt by Pablo D’Stair

IT WAS UNTIL A POINT she was uncertain of she had kept a list of the topics on which they had walked at night (coming usually to rest under the several trees upon the bit of hill near the roadside) lost in discussion of. This list she now found she knew was not a complete…
Esteban Rodríguez on Alen Hamza’s CSU Poetry Center debut collection Twice There Was a Country

Winner of the 2019 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Competition, Alen Hamza’s Twice There Was A Country is a collection that reminds us that regardless of the past or the circumstances we find currently ourselves in, it’s never too late to reconnect with who we are and where we came from. While Hamza’s…