Author: Heavy Feather
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Poetry: “Ouroboros” by Nancy Hightower
At fourteen, you see how the world is:the sky full of holes, your stepmother a wounded sparrow, prompting your father to hide all the guns. You’re the trigger, he whispers, slips you a pistol when you graduate college. At twenty-five, you receive an invitation to their hidden compound somewhere in the country, over the rainbow…
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“The Monstrous Maternal in Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s Third-Millennium Heart”: A Poetry in Translation Review by Jayme Russell
Third-Millennium Heart is awash with red blood, black blood, a flood of names and namelessness. The poems pulse with RED. A stream flows from the poems, filling the exo-heart as the word “mother,” “mother,” “mother” runs RED. With each line the map of the heart grid beats. This heart is growing through a demon incantation.…
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Comic: “A Tender-Hearted Beheading” by Nick Francis Potter
*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Nick Francis Potter lives in Missouri with his wife and two boys. New Animals (Subito Press, 2016) is his first book.
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Two Poems by Alyse Bensel
Broken Sonnet I want to reach inside of him. I’m tiredof his lack of sleep, the need to build worldsin his head all night. He’s tried to burn allthe pictures I’ve kept. A silent bird makestrees hush.He always wants me sleeping.So I combed the moths out of my hair, wantingmy head to ring like a…
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“Ghosts in the Trees”: A Review of Patricia Grace King’s novella Day of All Saints by Rachel C. Reeher
In Patricia Grace King’s Day of All Saints, a young Martín Silva de Choc meets Abby, an American student studying abroad at the Guatemalan language school for which he teaches. Abby’s long blonde braids and hypnotic laughter bring promise of a lovelier life in Chicago, but her presence is a stone in the water of his…
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Three Poems by Lauren Bender
Misdirection Snow comes, heavy distraction. We snipe at each other in the mid-afternoon dark because there is no time for distractions. (i think?) no one is focused on a single wrong anymore or the wrong wrong. There is an itchy place for every injury we’ve built into our brain/keep building/keeplistening when we’re told we are…
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Three Poems by Joshua Butts
Measley Ridge Road Moving with the weather is no optionfor those on Measley Ridge. No vessels are preppedfor when the Brazos sweeten. Shirley Hughes, send your laundry waterto the nearest stream. Ziplocs huddle the deathsof the holiest white poor with their ragged white meatand dry bushels requiring so many creamed sides.If this were Louisiana one…
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Essay: “Another Person Asks, When Did You Become a Feminist?” by Lindsay D’Andrea
“It comes with the job,” my mother says—meaning a possibility that your boss may touch you when you don’t expect him to—“So why all the fuss,” “take it as a compliment,” after all “boys will be boys,” etcetera. This is the woman who raised me. I wish I were not ashamed by her philosophy, wonder…
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“Cartesian Ghost Story,” an essay by Jeff Chon
I should avoid the old neighborhood, but I have nowhere else to be right now. It’s five seventeen p.m.—the day care closes at six—and the kids hate it when I pick them up early, when they have to say good-bye to their friends. Whether I like it or not, I have some time to kill,…
