Author: Heavy Feather

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…
Poetry by Jim Daniels: “Boo Boo”

Someone’s feelings were hurt. BadBoo Boo. Oops, Boo Boo. Some-one’s feelings. O I felt your feelings,wet smooshy feelings.Big Bang Theory of Hurtfeelings. Dealingswith feelings. Gel and a wetcomb. Band-aids and Cand-aids. Bloody sweet feelings.The Long and Shortof feelings. Errors-in-the-scorebook hurtfeelings. Wheeler-dealer feelings. O.Just O of hurt feelings.I am so O for yourhurt feelings. Can I…
“Ruidoso, Carrizozo, Ruidoso”: Short Fiction by Adrian Van Young

Billy Sue Dolan was from Ruidoso, one town in a hundred New Mexico towns. Except Ruidoso was in Lincoln County, the most violent part of that desolate state, where William McCarty or William H. Bonney or Billy the Kid, he would come to be known for the twenty-one men he’d reportedly slain, had seen ideal…