Author: Heavy Feather

Four Poems by Cynthia Marie Hoffman

[After the operation, my sister needs help] After the operation, my sister needs help getting out of bed. My mother’s bare feet gum the slick floor, bracing. My sister leans into her arms. The dogs’ eyes are wide. The two eyes of my mother’s blonde dog, the one eye of my sister’s whose bad eye…
Fiction: Timmy Reed’s “Minutes from Meeting of Afterdeath Board of Directors”

Minutes from Meeting of Afterdeath Board of Directors 12:00 PM January 1, 2012 Thin Gray Wrinkle In Between Spaces (Room #0) Attending: Skeletons, wights, high and low gods, sense of desperate loss (DESPAIR), TIME, decaying globs of flesh, beetles, worms. Death attended via conference call. Presenters included Lipsticked Fetus and Waxed Tentacle of the Soul…
“We’re Still Doing Things Within the Realm of What We’re Fit For”: An Interview with Keith Lesmeister by Linda Michel-Cassidy

Keith Lesmeister’s new collection of short stories, We Could’ve Been Happy Here, investigates the spectacle of the everyday. Set in the Midwest, his characters are relatable because of their wants, their bad choices, their ways of dealing with their lives. Lesmeister’s take is pragmatic, often humorous, and deeply felt. His attention to and honor for…
Fiction: Three Thought Experiments by Ron Burch

Thought Experiment 1 You are a white person. You have never been in trouble with law enforcement. You are driving to work. A police car pulls you over. You remove your driver license and registration. Over their loudspeaker, a police officer demands that you put your hands in the air. Both officers have their guns…
Five Poems by Michael Augustine Jefferson

Ode to Robert Jordan, for Whom the Bell Tolls And I went into the wooded area below East and by the creek and there I cried about an hour smoking Newports against a tree with my knees there at the chin and my feet angled awkwardly ugly as it all feels when drained down the…
Short Story Excerpt: “Mitzvah” from Pamela Ryder’s Paradise Field

Interconnected stories depicting the last years of a WWII bomber pilot, his relationship with his daughter as both child and adult, and his drift into infirmity and death. When life dwindles to its irrevocable conclusion, recollections are illuminated, even unto the grave. Such is the narrative of Paradise Field: A Novel in Stories, whose title is…
Three Poems by R.D. Landau

Ghazal Chocolate meditation: listen to the foil crinkle touch the smooth surface, bite off the tip, now eat the kiss. All she wants is to climb a tree in peace. But all these strangers (relatives) demand a kiss. She woke with the pain of childbirth (twins). What prince would slash through briar for a kiss?…
The Hour of Daydreams, a novel by Renee Macalino Rutledge, reviewed by Melissa McDaniel

No matter how well we think we know someone, it is never truly possible to fully understand another person. Within the complex maze of the human soul, there will always be unknown corners and hidden chambers. In The Hour of Daydreams, Renee Macalino Rutledge examines this struggle between intimacy and closeness through a lens of…
Fiction: Excerpt of Jorge Armenteros’ Novel The Roar of the River

Following the musical structure of the 17th century fugue, the narrative voices succeed each other until coming together in a polyphonic search for light among the darkness of their origins. Set in a perched village of the French Alps, between a roaring river and the moonlight, a man dressed in a striped tunic seeks encounters…