Author: Heavy Feather

Micah Zevin on Brendan Lorber’s if this is paradise why are we still driving?

Can we ever escape the hidden meanings of existence, the state of saying or doing one thing and meaning another? What to make of the silences, the pauses, fissures, elisions, we find in conversation or on the page? What can be mined from what’s missing? How will the gaps or empty spaces be filled if…
“Report of the Justification Committee,” original fiction by Jona Whipple for Bad Survivalist

We could not take the polar bears. We tried, but we couldn’t do it. By then, they were mostly extinct anyway, and the specimen that survived weren’t worth the trouble. We couldn’t take the snowy egrets, but downloaded all of the poetry about them and scanned every major work of art featuring them, which we…
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…