Author: Heavy Feather

Poetry: Jeanette Beebe’s “The Pallbearers”

“His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being—you know, shot. That was reported, and nobody talks about it. I mean, what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting?” —Donald Trump on Fox News, May 2016 As Kennedy was laid to rest in Washington with…
Side A Featured Essay: “Mercantile” by Jennifer Fliss

I am in a store that calls itself a mercantile. The floors are a bleached wood. It smells like patchouli with an overlay of dryer sheets. There’s a vast selection of essential oils. I smell them all until I smell them all as I move to the back of the store. I run my fingers…
Review: Robert Young on Han Yujoo’s Novel The Impossible Fairy Tale

If there’s one word that can be used to describe Han Yujoo’s novel, The Impossible Fairy Tale, it would be unique. Yujoo’s first novel published in English by Graywolf Press is a tour de force and totally unlike anything I’ve ever read before. The world of The Impossible Fairy Tale is dreamlike, and the way that…
Essay: “Proving Our Salt” by Sarah Fonseca

From the beginning, there was a lot of talk about his hands; so much that a particularly religious eavesdropper might’ve mistaken a conversation about him—transpiring during Easter, Ascension, or an average Friday train commute—for one about his antithesis, the martyred Jesus Christ. Coined by the clairvoyant writer Graydon Carter in 1989, “the short-fingered vulgarian” nickname…
Fiction: Katie M. Flynn’s “A Gift from Your Leader”

On the night of the election, I write a little satire piece about Trump involving Russian-speaking elves, hit send, and the next morning I’ve got an acceptance letter waiting in my inbox! Six weeks later, I have twelve more Twitter followers, and there’s a pair of shoes waiting for me outside my apartment door. The…
Review: Nick Sweeney on Found Audio by N.J. Campbell

N.J. Campbell’s Found Audio is the new Pandora’s Box of weird contemporary fiction. It forces the reader to grapple the very reason they are reading this slim but dense novel. It begs to be read. It questions itself. It haunts us. Most importantly, however, it makes the reader think about the very thin line between…
Essay: Erin Gunther’s “On Dancing”

I watched the two of them dancing on the table, my father sitting on the couch opposite the spectacle, looking utterly horrified. My mother was dancing with a mutual friend of my father’s, Helene. They had been drinking all night. I was only nine years old and had not often been around drunken adults. My…
Three Poems by Jess Smith

COMPLCT Long taught silence, long known loud. I’ve read we’re ripe for revolution. What’s it like (this is what it’s like) to watchthe world navel-split, umbilical and sticky with citrus? We shake hands, each as viscous as the next, each chin dribbled with what we swear we haven’t eaten, or were not finger-fed. Lipstick on…
Robert Young Review: Jac Jemc’s Novel The Grip of It

If you’re like me and are a big fan of psychological horror, you’ve been craving a book like The Grip of It. Jac Jemc’s novel is pitched as a “literary horror novel,” and it blurs many lines. As a psychological horror novel, the book blurs the line between the natural and the supernatural, what is…