Author: Heavy Feather

Fiction: “A Crushing Beauty” by Kelly Lynn Thomas

Mia has been dead for weeks, but she can’t bring herself to leave Nowhere, Pennsylvania. When it had become clear that the chemicals she’d poisoned herself with had only worked on her body, she’d planned to make for Los Angeles like she and her best friend had always dreamed. She makes it as far west…
A Short Story by Laura Hendrix Ezell: “Flight,” from A Record of Our Debts

The pain in childbirth was different for Rachel. When it was her time, she felt it in every part of her, as if the baby were forming just as she birthed it, tearing its muscles away from her own, drawing blood from her veins and breath from her lungs. It was, for Rachel, a splitting,…
Tina May Hall: Two Fictions from The Extinction Museum

Exhibit #408 from The Extinction Museum—Bisected baseball with cork center, two layers of beige yarn, white horsehide cover stained with dirt and grass, black and red stitching, unraveling Grandmother said a baseball of her youth had a sturgeon eye at the center. Spiny fish, nearly prehistoric, giants they wrestled in the mud rivers that bracketed…
Brad Rose: Two Poems

In Media Res Everything on this planet fails fails in the middle even death your life is death’s failure but it’s not too late you can rescue death you can go to death’s school, learn death’s lessons don’t worry study look, already you are between floors, a mezzanine you’re almost nothing inside you, there is…
Ryan Bollenbach: Two Poems

sometimes the word for tender isn’t tender there is a knife in the dishrack, sharp, facing the open kitchen. i take the blade in my palm. a hawk claws inside a river. i feel buzzing in the wetness of skin, a bright lamp near death. wrap a clean body in a blanket, tuck fibers into…
Two Poems by Kailey Alyssa

palisades i shed light like dampness to bloodmouth or cotton arches— that is to say, i like it when my belly stretches & holds in wind undone for the desert; how fingers hook edges of bra clasp how dicks harden under cotton bolded like a cliff but it’s too late— we roll back to standing…
Short Story Prize 2017: “Monument” by Kristen Gleason

Joanna Ruocco on “Monument,” winner of the 2017 Heavy Feather Story Prize: “A room in my apartment has windows all around (a box of glass), and the weird shining black-green of magnolia leaves presses up to the glass (a box in black-green). I read ‘Monument’ in that room and traveled from my own black-green world…
Jonah Davis on GLOSS, Rebecca Hazelton’s new poetry collection

Love is unworldly and nothing comes of it but love.William Carlos Williams If the seductive cover, with its sensual cover image split in half, its glamorous pinks and reds, and the title’s undulating cursive font—if these weren’t striking enough, Rebecca Hazelton’s new book of poems, Gloss, begins with the attention-grabbing poem “Group Sex.” What…
Ugly Music, a poetry collection by Diannely Antigua, reviewed by Esteban Rodríguez

Diannely Antigua’s debut collection Ugly Music is a lyrical collage that meditates on childhood, trauma, survival, sexual identity, love, loss, and the often complicated journey through womanhood. Antigua’s poems never shy away from subjects that are unfortunately still considered taboo in today’s social and political environment (sex, masturbation, lost pregnancies, etc.). Ugly Music is a…