Author: Heavy Feather

Fiction Review: Gabriel Welsch Reads The Pavilion of Former Wives by Jonathan Baumbach

It’s easy to feel distant at first in Jonathan Baumbach’s new collection of fictions, The Pavilion of Former Wives, due to what appears to be an initial bland affectation. The author suppresses the excess of detail and sensory noise that marks the contemporary condition for many, shaving away to the skeletal essentials of conflict in…
Poetry: “The River Holds the Ghost Ship Through Her Grief” by Amanda Oaks

There’s a sparseness of the tongue / a not-quite-what-I-mean / all of the time, I mean. / b/c it’s a fact / the word is not the thing— / but why? / i’d ask the sky / but it’s only / S-K-Y. … I ask you / how can the universe fit / between /…
“Back in the USSR”: Leonard Kress Reviews Bill Berkson’s Russian Notebook Invisible Oligarchs

Bill Berkson, who died in June 2016, was one of the last survivors of the original New York School that included Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and James Schuyler, poets who seemed equally at home in the world of art, or at least the New York art scene. The headline of his New York Times obituary…
Fiction: Peter Clarke’s “Untitled in B”

My refrigerator in its old age sometimes quivers and hums when its fan turns on. The quivering is completely insignificant, but the humming, I’ve found, is B, the musical note. It’s not sharp or flat; it’s a perfect B. Just like the fan in my crotchety refrigerator, anything that moves fast enough will begin to…
Fiction: Timmy Reed’s “The Spider’s Eggs”

I woke up after the storm and went outside to see what had been broken. The deck was intact, but all around the trees were crushed like bad teeth. My eye was drawn to the center of the gray deck where above the strewn pine needles and sticks, just inches over a composite-wood plank, there…
Fiction: Harmony Neal’s “This Is What It’s Like to Die”

Jasmine My father beat me for giving the dog some bread. The dog had looked so hungry and scared. Its fur was missing in patches and it only had one eye. The other socket was covered in pus and red bumps. I wasn’t scared of the dog. I wanted to help. I could remember a…
Two Poems by Natalie Shapero

Half-staff Long enough I have lived in this city—when the flagsits at half-staff, strangers ask me why, and askin vain. I only know the major deaths. I’m best with warsof expansion. On losses beyond that, I have littleto add, except to make clear I trust and do not envythe low clerk charged with every up…
Three Poems from Nymphlight: Erin Lyndal Martin

I Want to be Drunk with You So I Can See You Laugh:Les Amants du Pont-Neuf You, my lover, the fire-eater, lay with me atopthe oldest bridge that crosses the Seine, the wine making us hoot and yell.Booms of light flared and blasted, so we stood atop the bridge lookingat Paris—our Paris—and waiting for debris.…
Three Fictions by Megan Martin

Way Beyond Good and Evil I should be admiring and appreciating the Cloroxed whiteness of the shower curtain you Cloroxed yesterday. It certainly is a miracle: the whitest, most disinfected shower curtain upon this rotten earth. In Cloroxing, you have protected me from unimagined dangers like shower-bound disease. Instead, another man—an exciting one—is here in…