Author: Heavy Feather

Asa Montgomery: Three Poems from The Future

Like having your eyes sewn shut 1 Someone planted a treein my stomach. Roots tore through my ribs, limbs pokingunder my fingertips. Light splintered bark. My fingers felt the sun in the backs of human necks.Leaves brushed the backs of my lips. Invisible birds karee karee-ing,moths’ creaking their door hinge wings, leaving white dust in…
The Future: Sacred Places Tarot Deck by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. The Night City Providence, from twilight to the hour of the wolf. The hill, the river, the secret stairs behind the clock tower. Night walks, filled with nostalgia. Lantern-lined streets, haunted streets, and the sound of rain falling darkly into a storm drain. The song of the…
“Woe of the World,” a Future Drama by Rachel Joseph

GoatChorus of SufferersMedeaAntigoneSusanMollyLizzieOrestesGaryRodolfoTed At rise: A ritual. Sunrise to sunset. SUFFERERS OH, THE WOE OF THE world is upon us.Oh, the woe of the world is upon. GOAT Do not feast upon my body, no, feast upon my gaze.It’s wicked.It’s selective.It closes the world from itself, it closes the world. Remember my body…
“Plastic Light,” flash fiction from The Future by Jerrod Schwarz

The dam was a weird body at night. Big half of a hip. Bladderskin wrapped over a coccyx. Cut a stomach in half and tell the juices, stay mostly on this side. I tied a nylon cord around the boat’s bench seat and looped the other end around a leaking plastic bag of cow hearts.…
The Future: “Really Good Puppets,” a short story by Jill M. Talbot

Things can be people, when you get down to it, and this can be dangerous. It is most dangerous when a puppet becomes a person and fights back all it has been used for, or when a person becomes a thing and is so thing-like that it forgets that it ever was a person. These…
“Targets,” a Bad Survivalist essay by Kay Smith-Blum

Who breaks their arm planting bulbs? Well, technically, I was retrieving bulbs, from a box on the other side of the low-rise-industrial-wire fence they put up around small urban gardens at street level to keep out the dogs that don’t keep out the dogs. Why build a fence just high enough for me to trip…
Bad Poet, 100 bad poems by Brian Alan Ellis, reviewed by Charlene Elsby

Spread out over two pages at the start of Bad Poet is the sentence, “I write bad poetry and I don’t care.” So if you believe Brian Alan Ellis, you might as well put down the book right then, because it’s bad and you don’t have time for that. But the poems aren’t bad. They’re…
All Transparent Things Need Thundershirts, Dana Roeser’s fourth and newest poetry collection, reviewed by Juliana Converse

As I read Dana Roeser’s fourth and newest collection of poems, the world is in quarantine as we wait out the COVID-19 pandemic. At first, we heard the coronavirus would mostly affect the already vulnerable, the elderly and the immunocompromised. Children were thought to be less at risk, and if you were between the ages…
Tom Griffen’s Response to The Worming of America, Or, An Answer to the Arraignment of Women, a historical novel by Autumn Leaf

Please, do not get comfortable. To worm is to move with difficulty. To worm is to foist one’s way into. To worm is to make a rope smooth by winding lengths of fiber between preexisting strands. To worm is to create momentum through artful and insidious means. To worm is to move as its namesake—in…