Author: Heavy Feather

Lee Patterson: Two Essay Poems for Bad Survivalist

an essay about funerals I want to set a car on fire, set guns on fire, set love on fire—grow skin so crimson we call it fire. I want to grow a more giving heart, set it on fire, watch what crumbles crumble. trumpets blare against the wall. a temple falls, a medicine cabinet cracks…
Avery Colt Is a Snake, a Thief, a Liar, a debut novel by Ron A. Austin, reviewed by Erin Flanagan

Avery Colt is a kid who could use a break. In addition to the everyday struggles of adolescence, he’s caught in the webs of poverty, masculine expectation, and systemic racism that are keeping him, his family, and his community down. Set in North St. Louis, Ron A. Austin’s debut novel (winner of the Nilsen Prize)…
The Future Has Photography: “Men with Their Guns 2” by Margo Berdeshevsky

*Ed.’s Note: click image to view larger size. Margo Berdeshevsky is the author of: BEFORE THE DROUGHT (Glass Lyre Press/2017). She is the winner of Fiction Collective Two’s American Book Review/Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize: “a ‘thrillingly cutting-edge’ book of sensual short-short stories with photographs by the author.” (Robert Olen Butler on Beautiful Soon Enough).
Fiction from The Future: “Rabid Dogs” by Jason Arment

Time before the alarms, when violence was only overseas, seemed disconnected from the now—silent countdown. Clark glanced at his watch. Only two minutes left. He wished things could go back to the way they were, when his only worries had been never amounting to anything and loneliness. But something had changed. Now every sixty minutes…
A Story from The Future by C.A. Schaefer: “To Whom Will You Seem Beautiful”

I am eighteen when I decide. I stand by the bed of the creek, watching the light on the surface of the water, when a man steps down beside me. He takes my face in his hands and turns it, side to side, as I might inspect a puppy or an antique, and then says,…
“The Butchers”: A Fiction Excerpt from The Future by Alana I. Capria

On Sundays, we butchered. It made us so happy, S— and me. We did not mind the blood or sound. We butchered what crouched and quivered, what was soft against a knife. S— and I butchered until our hands were wet. We prepared the butchering for a meal, for stews, steaks, and roasts. I carried…
“Onyx Egg”: Poetry from The Future by Caleb Nelson

someday things will be the worst they’ve ever beennothing will be all right essentially everything will suckthe most it’s ever sucked I’ve been trying to preparefor this impending suckage by holding one blue onyxegg in my hands while I sleep under the lumberingthunder of another winter’s calibrated dream call it whatever you want it’s okay…
“all gorgeous objects found in the terror of your past”: A Poem from The Future by Jeff Pearson

1. Ongoing whispers in your head. 2. Your howls.3. All memorials for something.4. You do not succeed in hefting up this bulk of matted fur.5. The building of something and the razing of another.6. Your taste of salt unsettled. 7. You pour out hieroglyphics of a hundred handprints, / the Fremont Indian Ruins of transpired…
Haunted Passages: “A Quiet Place to Sleep,” fiction by Nicole C. White

Angelica finds herself in the nexus of several intersecting red corridors. Everything is red: the walls, the stucco ceiling, the trim, the plush carpets. Each corridor recedes into the far distance and is studded with doors spaced at irregular distances apart, and each door has above it a tubular fluorescent bulb. But the bulbs are…