Author: Heavy Feather

Haunted Passages Short Fiction: “Fate Cat” by Olufunmilayo Makinde

“Keep your hat on!” Ajoke’s mother yelled as she watched her daughter leave for school. “Yes ma!” Ajoke yelled back, pulling her cap tighter over her head by its brim as she ran out of the house and headed toward the bus outside. Ajoke was born with a cat on her head, just like her…
Two Poems for Haunted Passages: Disha Trivedi

Poem in Place of a Needle My lover writes letters, sealedwith saliva, and I cut them open,put tongue on paper that delivershis tongue. Become old-world lovers.Grandmother, grandfather, weddedby ocean. Nineteen, already armedwith a lifetime’s distress. Some lovers have reason for hurting. Onebigger than childhoods of butterbrowned over. Once, I was goodat scaling trees in the…
“What ‘Coming Home’ Truly Means”: Nicole Yurcaba Reviews Michael Ramos’ Memoir The After

Thirteen days before 9/11, Michael Ramos enlisted in the Navy and was assigned to serve as a chaplain’s bodyguard. He had no clue he would be sent to Iraq, and he embraced the posting as well as his combat service until the military determined his skillset was no longer needed. However, after his military career…
Fiction Review: Matt Robertshaw Reads Lindsay Zier-Vogel’s Novel The Fun Times Brigade

It’s rare to see yourself depicted so tangibly in a novel. In many ways Lindsay Zier-Vogel’s Fun Times Brigade is about me. The protagonist, Amy Scholl, is a struggling singer-songwriter turned children’s musician who is grappling with the vicissitudes of success and artistic fulfillment. Me too. She is also a parent experiencing the profound joys…
Book Review: Mitch Levenberg Reads Caroline Hagood’s Essay in Prose Poems Death and Other Speculative Fictions

There are ghosts and then there are ghosts. Caroline Hagood writes about the latter. Not the ghosts of vengeance, or the kind that make walls sweat, but ghosts of love, heartbreak, longing, the ghost within us, the ghosts lined up along the viewing stand of our unconscious minds, that both cheer and haunt us, the…
Poetry Review: Rob Stanton Reads Kimberly Lambright’s Collection Doom Glove

Kimberly Lambright’s debut collection, Ultra-Cabin, introduced a poet possessing that one thing we all—surely?—want from poetry: a genuinely original way of seeing the “nothing new.” But she also knew that a surrealism that veers too far or too quickly into the wholly other is always going to be less striking than one which remains rooted…
Fiction Review: Tara Van De Mark Reads Amy Stuber’s Collection Sad Grownups

At a time when many of us are feeling low, Amy Stuber’s debut story collection, Sad Grownups, accepts this truth and, in doing so, helps reorient us to something like a middle ground. The stories embrace the rawness of life, its trauma, failure, despondency, grief, how our hurt little kid selves never really leave us, and…
“There Is So Much to Unlearn”: An Interview with Wendy C. Ortiz by Jax Connelly

When I was sixteen, I had a fat crush on my boss at the grocery store where I scanned boxes of cereal and punched in produce codes for five dollars an hour. He was twenty-four, a community college dropout with dyed-black hair and a tattoo of a guitar stretching out over the back of his…
Fiction Review: Elizabeth H. Winkler Reads Jen Michalski’s Novel All This Can Be True

If you begin Jen Michalski’s All This Can Be True on the bus, you’ll almost certainly miss your stop. Written in alternating points of view, the book is as much a story of self discovery and queer coming-of-age as it is a story of love, and Michalski tells it well. Our protagonists are Lacie Johnson…