Author: Heavy Feather

New Haunted Passages Short Story by David Leo Rice: “The Ward Clerk”

One: Philadelphia, 1965 Only the Ward Clerk, Gladys van Pelt, knew the full nature of the syndrome that tore through and perhaps, in some underlying sense, generated my family, and she shared her findings with no one except those who received me in the end, when it was far too late for that knowledge to…
New Essay: “In Praise of Obscurity” by Thomas B

“I’m nobody! Who are you?” —Emily Dickinson I. Invocation: Lost Names “No, my name is lost.” So says Edgar in Act V of King Lear, a man dismantled by power and betrayal, speaking from the ruins of identity. Not a voluntary effacement but a forced disappearance. This is not the freedom of the nameless mystic;…
Haunted Passages: Three Poems by Suzette Bishop

Strawberry Moon Rises We’re living in a mud house,one main room with a sink,a small galley kitchen off the one room,a bathroom somewhere, presumably.It’s handy to have the extra sinkin the main room but also strange.We have a heavy kitchen table. I look for things we might renovate,casting my eyes around and aroundthe main room,…
Fiction for Flavor Town USA: “The Short, Crazy Marriage of Bubba Verboten and Myrtle Bellagamba” by Eli S. Evans

Bubba There was a building in Bubba Verboten’s neighborhood, a windowless brick building with a big electronic sign hanging from the facade that said, in black letters over a pixelated green background: “Desire.” “Maybe I should check it out,” thought Bubba. “In fact, I think I will. After all, what do we want out of…
Haunted Passages: Four Poems by Oleg Olizev

The Fire You Fed You, with your violent inclination,shattered my stove.Now my oven of love is broken,my cranberry juice blooms across the kitchen tiles,staining the grout like evidence.You called it passion.I call it wreckage. You stuffed rice pudding into the wound,as if its sweetness could cover your crimes.Instead of making love, you used me—your hands,…
Three Original Poems by Eleanor Levine

What the Legendary Do Abbie Hoffman says “rich kids do heroin”Springsteen plays pool with my brotherBob Dylan snores at an A.A. meetingToni Morrison is a postage stampLiz Smith disparages my researchGrandpa Munster makes sexist remarksChairman Mao doesn’t brush his teethStalin kisses you in the East VillageHitler taps me at the Exxon stationJohn Goodman argues in…
Fiction Review: Al Kratz Reads Ruyan Meng’s Novel The Morgue Keeper

Ruyan Meng’s The Morgue Keeper is an intense book, maybe more so than any book I’ve read since Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Across 200 pages and 27 chapters, it tells the story of Qing Yuan, a morgue keeper trying to survive China’s Cultural Revolution in the summer of 1966. Essentially assigned to clean dead bodies…
New Fiction for Bad Survivalist: “EDC” by Kent Kosack

Lesser men leave the house without sparing a second, third, or 464th thought for what they carry. Without a plan, a backup plan, a backup plan should the backup plan prove itself wanting. Not him though. He’s equipped for all contingencies. Prepared. Properly outfitted. Carry for the life you want, not the life you have—that’s…
Poetry for Haunted Passages: “Solitude” by Grace Lynn

This poem pushes off from a riverbank,disturbing wild geese dozing in the current and is chased by a crowd of thrashing,hollering kids. They want to hold it in sight before it goes out into the tides,in its trail an incisioninto the water. The waves like twopages rising.I walk on planks that crackunder my bones but carry themto a path that…