Author: Heavy Feather

Poetry: Amy Forstadt’s “What My Son Learns”

My son learns to readin school. His teachers are calm and cold.They teach him words like contrarianbut not denier. Alleged not false.Alt-right not wrong. My son learns math. His teachers smilewhen they’re furious.They show him two plus twoequals five. And how divisionmatters most of all. My son learns art. His teachers give him all white…
Three Poems by Julie Rouse

The Direst I’ve been the same bad dream since I was eight.Still the body its interlocutors.Pierce my ear and listen to the crunch.Stick a needle underneath my thumb.Listen to mom and dad in the next room.Listen to the Bangles Egyptian.Piss in the corner, old enough to know.Dippy puppies hump each other for fun.Out in the…
Four Crash Studies by Scott Teplin

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger size. Chopped Shadow Clamper Tire Drop Shadow Gap-Toothed Shadow Scott Teplin is an artist living in Brooklyn, New York. More: teplin.com.
Three Poems by Joseph Mulholland

Transmigration, Volume One Did you recognize the sensation of olive meat hugging its cold pit for warmth? Her blood-belly protrudes over the ruined slipstream—secrets of torn flesh pinpush in the gunshot light. The walls of this open hymnal shine jukebox-pink—she adjusts fingers under the elastic band, glassglued to inconstancy, afflicted. Your morning electric chair shrinking…
Essay: “15 Things Women Should Do When Bumping into a racist, bigot, &/or misogynist” by jacklyn janeksela

Do not devalue a list that could save your life. Feel free to follow one of more of these steps in any order; do not hesitate to follow them all. We need to support each other in any way possible. And when I say we, I am not talking about anyone in the Trump camp…
James Ardis Reviews Jarett Kobek’s Soft & Cuddly

Soft & Cuddly (1987) and its predecessor Go to Hell (1985) were horror games published on cassette tapes for what is now an obscure British computer system. The games were proudly the products of a teenager’s boredom and embraced the label “Video Nasties” that was used in the 1980s by Britain’s elite to damn subversive…
Essay: “God Loves the Nasty Women” by Nancy Hightower

God Loves the Nasty Women In 2016, America came close to having its first woman president. Instead, our electoral college has given us a man who revels in grabbing women’s pussies. This unrepentant misogynist gained the White House in no small part due to the actions of evangelical right. In The Washington Post, Sarah Pulliam…
Book Review: Zachary Kocanda on Chelsea Martin’s Novella Mickey

The epigraph for Chelsea Martin’s novella Mickey is a lyric from the song “3 AM” by Matchbox 20: “It’s all gonna end and it might as well be my fault.” It’s an appropriate introduction because pages later, the narrator breaks up with her boyfriend, the titular Mickey. Yet this VH1’s 100 Greatest Songs of the…
Fiction: “Sarcophagy at Mar-a-Lago” by Derick Dupre

You’ve never seen a colder bunker. Of course I got this rigged with a.c., naturally the best and coldest, ice cold as the backseat of your grandma’s cadillac. There’s nothing fresher than what’s here I guarantee it. This is one of the finest examples of civil defense on the entire globe and that’s including Antarctica,…