Author: Heavy Feather

“Slumroom,” a story by Stephanie Jimenez

At his insistence, Marisa’s father accompanied her to the prospective apartment off Northern Boulevard. It was September, and on the way there, they got caught on a side street behind a school bus. They didn’t know the cause of the hold-up until they saw a veiled figure run down the sidewalk and up to the…
Excerpt: SITU, fiction by Steven Seidenberg

SITU is a hesitant unfolding of demise, a text that occupies the interstices between diegetic, philosophical, and poetic discursive timbres. From this tension—which finds form in an indeterminate subject’s relationship with a bench, his anguished site of rest and motion—the subsequent flux at the center of the narrative voice facilitates a kind of epistemology of…
An Excerpt of Laura Catherine Brown’s Comic Novel Made by Mary

Made by Mary is a black comedy using magic realism to blow up myths about women, mothers, daughters and motherhood. Unable to conceive and, because of her husband Joel’s youthful conviction for marijuana dealing, unable to adopt conventionally, Ann and Joel pinned their hope on Jessica, an unwed pregnant girl who offers them her baby.…
Essay: “Dinner with Trump and the Art of (Im)potent Rage” by Janet Mercel

My niece brought her boyfriend back east last summer to meet all of us. He was sweet and placid and quiet enough that I wasn’t sure he was paying attention until he’d had enough cocktails to loosen his lips. Later in the evening he told me how intimidated he’d been to be presented to the…
Fiction: “My Father’s Great Recession” by Alex Kudera

Fierce rains pour from black clouds, and when at last we meet in the parking lot, I see an obese and aged semblance of Dad. He wears a blonde mustache, but his receding topsoil is corn-silk white. Beige slacks and a light blue sweater do little to mask his immense roundness. Three hundred pounds or…
Three Poems by Anne Champion

How Capitalism Breathes Through a gas mask/ in a uniform/ hurling tear gas/ with a chokehold/ elbow cocked like a gun/ deep inhale/ holding its breath/ ducking for cover during a mass shooting/ the aroma of factory chimneys smells like money/ through a gas mask/ does blood smell like power/ drop the noose/ drop the…
“Dear Dana Loesch,” an interactive poem by Rachael Shay Button

Dear Dana Loesch, Todaywhile you tweet,Parklandstudentsreturn:retrieve backpackscell phones,windbreakers,water bottles,chapstick,math books.Returnto classroomswhere they satsilentin supply closetseyes adjustingto darkears tunedto the soundof breathof shots. Dear Dana Loesch, You kept your kids away from public school homeschooled opposed testing standards wroteMamalougesabout raising your babies unrushed. Your children got to start slow lessons on the living room rug lunch…
Fiction: “Abortion Clinic, 2021” by Beth Fiset

We wait in rows along the walls until one of our names is called and we reshuffle. We wait seated in chair clusters. We wait huddled over one another to sleep for hours on end because we can’t help ourselves, though, we want to be awake when they call so we are not skipped over…
Tenderling, a poetry collection by Emily Corwin, reviewed by Dameion Wagner

Before flipping through and selecting a single poem in Emily Corwin’s new Tenderling, readers are struck by the text’s cover, an array of sharply mottled, kaleidoscopic, but no less formed and fantastical images. Sarah Shields’ illustrations contrasted over a faux beige linen background are marked by deep, bright reds and touches of blacks in flowers…