Author: Heavy Feather

Short Story: “Rhizome” by Daniel Miller

OneYou exit the long or short corridor and enter a hexagonal room with a door on each wall. A room with paint on each wall, too, and the paint in this room is alloy orange. On each door, a numeral is printed in gold foil—two through nine. In the center of room is a table…
A Poem by Bridget Talone: “A Dream Is a Witch Your Heart Makes (Music for Shame)”

Ask not how you could ever make it right.Instead, lie down in your young shame—its dirty, slender hairdo blades. That panic madethe mouth. The villain fed his girlfrienda cube of fish off his steak knife,then drew the blade back through her cheek.Misfortune filled the little mouths that opened.Noisy rubies claw a formal sky.Ashamed, the player…
Sara Lippmann Fiction: “Runner’s Paradise”

I’m taking up running, I tell my husband at breakfast. My husband smiles though his juice. Adam is always running and he is always smiling an electric mouthful of fenced whites. He wears spandex shorts and neon shirts of breathable fabric. His man smell rises off of him, benign, like a tea: sweet grassy armpit.…
Illustration by Matt Kish: “Bestiary: Catoblepas”

*Ed.’s Note: click image to view larger size. Matt Kish is a self-taught artist and librarian. He was born in 1969, in June, and lives in Ohio with his wife and their frog.
F. Daniel Rzicznek Poetry: “Hatchet”

Came down from the hills to findthe thaw refrozen, ground even harderthan before, and this in late March: twist of smoke to the south,early star or two riding the blue. The half-tame one, chest-deep in snow,looked back at me, his face tilting asmemories pooled in my head: the time he stole a deer femur,huffing and…
“Hard,” a poem by Colin Winnette

We were born hard. We own a pit bull. We don’t eat much. We’re quiet. If you saw us on the street, you might cross it and enter a store. You might avert your eyes. You would try not to look at our pit bull. Or at us. We are gray and stiff and ungentle.…
Five Mathematical Poems by Timothy Wojcik

Mathematics IIIIIIIIIIIIIIII Start with one body, and one sky. End with the sky in the body, and one sky. The organs are in the middle of the sea. The sea is in the middle of the flock of loons. The flock of loons is in the middle of the enormous heart, mathematically speaking. An enormous…
Phil Spotswood: “The First Engineer,” a poem

learned momentum from falling birds, howthey hit the water faster than the fish could dielearned that trees heaped together couldform a sort of barrier, to keep things in or out—how,also, the laying down of two bodies couldcreate new space and angles the first engineer came to understandthe language of snake-speak in grass, howindentations point towards…
Poetry by Sean Thomas Dougherty: “These Ordinary Days”

Out of the brown bag I placethe red wine and sack of sugar I swing our eldest daughterdespite my swollen knee and fix you coffee with cream,and the clouds swirl like the unsayable our daughters curly headedand crying, run out the glass porch door,I watch them through an invisible windowLike the one between us and…