Author: Heavy Feather

Bad Survivalist: “Up next,” a visual story hybrid by N.D. Brown

*Ed.’s Note: click image to view larger size. _____________________________________ 1. The following are real YouTube videos generated from the search, “Protect My Family.” 2. Times Watched: 3 3. Times Watched: 6 4. Times Watched: 2 5. Times Watched: 4 6. Times Watched: 8 7. Times Watched: 1 8. Times Watched: 1/2 9. Times Watched: 3/4…
Three Disaster Movies from The Future: Poems by Lucas Pingel

Disaster Movie At the edge of the locust storm our toes Make a quiet music a prayer for broken Wings go further than the natural cadence A new word to signal an unplanned spring We remember it as holy another way Our knuckles speak to one another Walls once smooth and white pages Once smooth…
Ryan Mills: “Poem”

Then his pancakes come and I’m likePlease leave the flowers—and really, after his question(“have you ripped a big one lately?”)I see he’s a one-trick pony.A tiny glass vase centers our table Then his pancakes come and I’m likeHow could anybody masturbate to Slaughterhouse-Five?My Aunt the Grandmanever put on a belt herself, how awkward!the dancing. Then…
The Future: “Anything Can Be a Weapon,” a collaborative short story by Dana Diehl & Melissa Goodrich (from The Classroom)

When the zombies overtook the Lakeshore School District, the Dads were the first to go. They were crossword Dads. Whiskery and near-sighted. They were dads with novelty bowties. Some say the zombies took the Dads first because they were the strongest, because the zombies were building an army and needed strong soldiers. But we know…
The Future: Four Illustrations by Selene dePackh

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Illuminated Passages 11-a Illuminated Passages 25 PTSD 2nd Restatement PTSD 3rd Restatement Selene dePackh creates innovative story lines that expand the science fiction genre of cyberpunk into an entirely new subcategory which she calls Neuropunk, which draws on her own autism to immerse the reader in a…
“When It Was Over,” a Bad Survivalist poem by Tyler Dillow

It was like coffee spilling on my shoes. The insects: beetles, ants, mosquitos. You—repeating—and flies on my feet, in my ears, on my feet. It was the buzzing that filled me. Mayflies, the color of your skin. Caterpillars, the color of your skin. Their eyes, the color of your skin. My name—you kept saying it—over…
Zachary Kocanda on Ryan Werner’s Brainwashing Miss Teen Nosebleed USA, a book of one sentence album reviews

I was introduced to Ryan Werner’s work when I read and reviewed his novella Soft (Passenger Side Books, 2015) a few years ago. The novella is composed of two hundred fifty-eight micro-chapters, some as short as one sentence, so it made sense that for his new book, Brainwashing Miss Teen Nosebleed USA, Werner decided to…
“He Came into the House,” a short story for Haunted Passages by Fraylie Nord

When the trap door swung down, the girl received it with her entire body. I saw it happen before I disappeared. It wasn’t intentional, and I knew I was in trouble. The door wasn’t engineered to hurt people. It was meant to hinge downward, hold the weight of a terrifying girl, and then swing back…
Poetry: Three EVP Recording Sessions by Lauren Brazeal Garza

EVP Recording Session #1: The Original Poltergeist Recalls “I moseyed to the lifeless party late, buried my shock under my skirts just like a garter. —Wait. I never moved or carried anything. No clothing in the great beyond. It’s tailored: each unpleasant underworldly task. Our assignment was forgetting all that’s physical. No body danced, I…