Author: Heavy Feather

Bad Survivalist Poetry: “Self Portrait, Australia” by Annie Hulkower

You could bounce a quarter off the soles ofmy feet, thanks to a lengthy study in not wearingshoes, this keeps me moving across the outback.I smell like: hard muscles, desolation,am swift like a mammal. If you peeledthem back, you’d see somethingelse snaked through my plantar facea—it’s what keeps me moving. These days, it seems my…
Serialized Essay: “The Great Indoorsman, Part the Last” by Andrew Farkas

The Great Indoorsman PART THE LAST From A Philosophy of the Indoors—The Out-of-Doors vs. Outside: In Lawrence, Kansas, a Lyft driver asks me where my accent’s from, says she’s lived lots of places, says she has a good ear for accents, says that I do a good job of covering it up, but that I…
“History Repeats and Stories Become Complete”: Fabulations, minimalist short stories by José de Piérola, reviewed by Mark Crimmins

José de Pierola’s Fabulations is an impressive and deeply stimulating collection, one that explores a diapason of forms and modes as it slyly reinterprets the implications of its title. Fabulism, late in the second decade of the twenty-first century, is one of the favored modes of a new generation of writers who have moved on…
Bad Survivalist Poetry: “A Suitable Piece of Real Estate (As You Like It)” by W.E. Pierce

By the pine gapin these woods is a green doorinto the code We find it onan early walk after coffee(imported unimportant)The air is cold but the door steamswarm to the touch though we don’t touchIt hums Someone runs the numberson this thing that hasn’t happened to us yet(the insects halve and halve and halve and halve…
“An Ending for Her,” flash fiction by Matthew Meriwether

What if I walked up to your front door again. What if, at the sight of me on the front porch, the same front porch with so many stale memories, instead of laughing at my patheticness, you smiled with surprising relief. What if you had gained a little weight, the weight symbolic of your settling…
Part the Third: “The Great Indoorsman” by Andrew Farkas

The Great Indoorsman PART THE THIRD From A Philosophy of the Indoors—The Beautiful On-Purpose and the Beautiful Accident: The waitress looks at me and frowns. She says she’s seen me before, thinks she’s seen me before, is told that she has indeed seen me before. Baffled, befuddled, the waitress asks if I live in Chicago,…
“Mud Witch,” an incantation for Haunted Passages by Michael Sikkema

this pit’s everything a mouth of sky Mud Witch dreams me in her teeth it all vibrates wrong when the pain stops this pit’s everything gathers worms moles beetles so I don’t starve I cup mud it all started with the sinkholes we lost the whole golf course Mud Witch grabs the rope over my…
“What He Said,” flash fiction by Matthew Meriwether

I ask her what he said. He her boyfriend. He her boyfriend, the bartender, the man who watches. He told her I was rude. He told her I made fun of him and the other bartenders. He told her I was with “that girl you hate.” That girl our old friend. Our old friend with…
Part the Second: “The Great Indoorsman” by Andrew Farkas

The Great Indoorsman PART THE SECOND From A Philosophy of the Indoors—Where I Lived, and What I Lived for: I went to the Indoors because, like Henry David Thoreau, I wished to live deliberately, I wished to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to…