Author: Heavy Feather

We Could’ve Been Happy Here, debut story collection by Keith Lesmeister, reviewed by Ray Barker

The characters in Keith Lesmeister’s debut short story collection, We Could’ve Been Happy Here, are populated with men stuck in the painful middle-distance of life, haunting the rural and lonely locales of the Midwest, the Iowa small towns serving as a microcosm of their weary worldview. The parameters of the physical geography are clear: fading…
Flowers & Sky, lectures and unpublished poems by Aaron Shurin, reviewed by Daniel Casey

Every poet is unconsciously dominated by particularities. There is a moment in the writing life of most when they come to realize not just their habits or style but also obsessions and predilections. It is a moment when a writer sees their work from the outside. Often, this will lead to self-imitation or, to put…
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?…