Author: Heavy Feather

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…
Three Poems by Jill M. Talbot

Saturday Night Palsy (i) I am not sure about this case. But that is not what I meant to say.What I meant was that my fingers disagree—my right hand—left brain has control since I have Saturday Night Palsy where your hand just gives up on life—an existential crisis—and no matter what it won’t face life.…
Poetry: Excerpts from Margo Berdeshevsky’s Before the Drought

Before the Drought is a lyric meditation on corporeal existence, suffused with atavistic spirit and set in historical as well as cosmic time, a work of radical suffering and human indifference but also sensual transport. The tutelary spirits of these poems are the feminine principle, and a flock of messengers that include blue heron, ibis, phoenix,…
Five Poems from The Tongue of Narcissus by Jennifer Bullis

Echo’s Letter to Cassandra I can’t say I blame Hera for punishing me with this voicelessness,this accursed repetition. She has run out of ways to punish Zeus except by afflicting those in whom he takes his delights.Take them he does: he does charm, but never asks consent. Leda, Leto, Metis—not one of them told him…
Poetry: “A Non-Apology” by Katie Chicquette Adams

—for Sarah, “The Lion,” interpreter for American forces in Iraq Look, I’m really sorry there are terrifying people in your hometown who want to kill you because you helped me, that’s some rotten luck, for sure, but I gotta look out for me now. Me and mine, y’know? You’re taking this personally— it’s not…
Fiction: “Kirk and Anna Lee Just Disagree” by Vic Sizemore

After Anna Lee told her husband Ridvan she was leaving him, he got himself transferred back home to Meadow Green. To try and work things out. Suddenly he was no longer gone weeks at a time, but was always fucking home, always trying to get them to do things as a goddamned family. It was…
Side A Featured Poem: Jonathan May’s “The Night Journey”

(found poem from multiple sources [FBI Guantanamo Bay Inquiry // The Night Journey, Sura 17, The Koran // Department of Defense Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual – 1983]) The purpose of all coercive techniques is to induce psychological regression in the subject by bringing a superior outside force to bear on his will to…
Three Poems by Heikki Huotari

CONSTITUENTS You are a good god yes you are (what I call love does not exist) so get me some constituents and fast. It’s always all about the U-turn, no? There is no wind, there is no spit. If we were Mars and Venus, exponentially decaying, and if half of us were gone, would we…