Author: Heavy Feather

Two Poems by Linette Reeman

As Donald Trump Is Being Inaugurated a girl and i stagger out of a tear-cloud and shakeinto each others’ mouths. there is no one i loveout of necessity, but this is a love hatched undera sky bursting and marred by flames. a week later, the joke is still good. we started dating becausea riot bloomed…
Four Illustrations by Jon Read

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Smoke Signals Inside Fun Lake Mutant Love Mutant Attack A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Jon Read is a graduate of Kent State University. His style is influenced by visionary folk art and neo-expressionism. His paintings portray a strong narrative, telling stories heavily influenced by comic books, cult films,…
“I, Too, Am Ruining My Own Life”: Jesse Rice-Evans on Gwen Werner’s I’m Ruining My Own Life

Gwen Werner gets me: anxieties about gender, sexuality; being a total nihilist but loving my nest anyway; trying to not be an awful straight-passing feminist; surviving, but barely. Werner stumbles through life, but her voice is unwavering: she might hate herself, but she knows how to shape a story, and, maybe most importantly in short-form…
Four Poems by Katie Hibner

Smart Varmints You talk about how they’re smart varmints: they crawl out of a splintered helix,grow up crust-pluckingfor gratuities. They want to sic their reliquaries on ours,semantically blitzthrough our amber waves. They’re not cute and they’re not cubedbitesize;they gnaw on our breaded trade winds. You talk about howbots admit them through our firewalls,ignoring their flagrantly-laundered…
Fiction Review: Ray Barker Reads Alexander Boldizar’s The Ugly

Even courageous readers have likely never encountered a character with the overwhelming physical mass and intellectual presence of (northern) Siberian oaf, and oversized tribal chief, Muzhduk Ugli the Fourth. Muzhduk is the three-hundred-pound blond-bearded protagonist that propels Alexander Boldizar’s oddly unforgettable debut novel, The Ugly, to its fairytale end. The novel ostensibly details the life…
There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, stories by Michelle Ross, reviewed by Dana Diehl

The stories in Michelle Ross’ debut collection, aptly named There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, are fueled by grade school science, by snake venom, by fossilization, by velocity, by the kind of magic that’s real. Ross’ characters live in half-formed worlds, their vision limited by their circumstances. In these twenty-three stories, characters stare down…
Five Poems by Alia Hussain Vancrown

Alif. Lām. Mīm. Morning’s glorious sclera peels night like peach skin.The casual tugging of a hangnail accentuates each hamzah. There is pain in meaningless recitation—when the bearded preacher arrives at the house before the milkman, it’s too earlyfor children to memorize sounds unable to be translated, struck into meaning from only his well-meaningbamboo discipline stick.…
Fiction: “A Texas” by Laura Ellen Scott

Bonnie & Jack Bonnie collects Jack from rehab. Fucking bougainvillea everywhere. “Thanks.” He slides into the passenger seat, tosses a half-empty duffel into the back of the white pickup and says, “Jesus.” He can’t believe it, the day, Bonnie, anything. He’s out. She can’t really bring herself to it. It’s east Texas, wet and hot.…
Fiction: Trent England’s “Patience Is the Most Passive Discipline”

The woman walking toward me is not the woman I last saw four years ago. My wife exits the airport terminal in fatigue pants and rubber sandals, her hair held back in a military bun. She wears a t-shirt with the phrase Present Without Pay written over it, and when I ask what the shirt…