Author: Heavy Feather

Fiction: Marleen S. Barr’s “A Feminist Extraterrestrial Special Forces Commander Causes Trump to Become Gone with the Wind”

The civilian body armor market was valued at $72.2 million in 2016 and is expected to more than double by 2024, according to Grand View Research.—Tiffany Hsu, “With Schools as Targets, Security Outfits Flourish,” The New York Times, March 5, 2018, A17. I was sitting in the eye doctor’s waiting room scared to death because I…
Poetry: “Non-” by Britt Canty

Boundaries. We need boundaries, you said. You were nothing if not a man of reason. My fingers raked the cement, still clay-like. I wanted to leave an impression before it turned solid. Before you left. Shards of shell and rock crowded into the skin beneath my nails. I tried to write my name so that…
“The Autolycus Syndrome,” flash fiction by Jay Merill

Giles lived for dressing up in quirky costumes and pointing people in the wrong direction. Trickery was his forte. He was all wolf at heart but smiled at everyone with the sweetness of a curly sheep. Baaa. The snag was all his feats were imaginary and more than anything he wanted real. He wanted real…
“The True Story of William T. Vollmann’s Research Assistant,” an essay by Jordan A. Rothacker, William T. Vollmann’s Reasearch Assistant for Carbon Ideologies

Trust me, I know I’m lucky. Once upon a time, I was a college kid in the Nineties reading William T. Vollmann, my mind blown with almost every sentence, and now he’s someone I call a dear friend. My child knows him as Uncle Bill. I also call him boss, as I had the honor…
“Everything Was Cliché and Nothing Hurt,” an essay by Alaina Symanovich

Paint this scene: imbue it with optimistic lighting à la Glee and the stench of yesterday’s cafeteria surprise à la every public high school in America: fill in any gaps with some universal notion of teenage angst and low-grade depression. This particular story unfolds in Smalltown, Florida, a wart on the pallid swampland; maybe it…
Poetry: “when i say fuck men” by Mandy Shunnarah

when i say fuck meni don’t mean the verbthat opens legsdrops pantscommands sex i mean the onethat dismisses menas worthlessthe verb that saysi’m donei’m outyou have nothing to offer me no one crosses my thresholdbut whom i allowthis space—my space—is barred to you when i say fuck menwhat i mean isi’m tiredwearyexhausted and exasperatedi don’t…
Six Poems from Oliver Baez Bendorf’s The Gospel According to X

Flicker of orange outside the window. Day breaks into pieces. What man feels man enough? Twinge while the oil seeps in. Is not for chit chat. He brought himself forth and called himself X. That is the good news. Is this still the good news? Scientists believe all mammals dream. I believe in the necessity…
Three Poems by Kathleen Jones

The Appropriate Cold—for Amy Your death fell with a thud that bruised the rest of us.Now I’m homesick for a winter we can’t return to in a state I’ve long left and you rarely visited, the appropriate coldI don’t feel here. The Fleetwood, a metalbox diner nesting in snow, blue streetlit sidewalks on the approach,…
“Marvel,” a lyric essay by Jennifer H. Fortin

Why does it bother me when others marvel at what I don’t find wondrous? It has to do with naiveté, with undue congratulations. I feel bad every second of every day. Or it has to do with false enticement: they are trying, via Marvel, to elicit a dramatic reaction. I can’t believe x! Marvel as…