Author: Heavy Feather

Essay: Excerpt from Tiny Gradations of Loss by Nicholas Grider

Tumors that couldn’t have grown fast enough to suffocate her. She died from cancer, she died from causes unknown. With him but already gone, crimson scarlet alone. Still warm. _______________ Day -2 he thinks it must just be all the morphine. He wants to think so. He says it to himself. He says it to…
Poetry: Joshua Ware’s “The Divine Mystery of Clothes”

cut from fabric in a secondhand store, unravels our emptinessinto closets of cotton, linen, nylon, and silkIn the dream of fashion etiquette not yet discoveredwe speak in hushed tones of a blue taffeta gown you will wearfor the second-coming: a rapture rendingthe naked from the nude, a divide never healedfrom now until nightdress. I cannot…
Fiction: Dan Crawley’s “Bonkers”

Becky and Coach stand shoulder to shoulder at the sliding glass door and watch what is going on outside. Earlier, snowflakes the size of teeming confetti poured out of the sky and covered the ground with a few inches. But now with the sun fully out, the white stuff sticking to the small backyard patio…
Fiction: Tom McCartan’s “Tennessee Williams Is a Hack”

I used to think I invented this one word. One day I looked it up and it turned out that Mark Twain had used it in some damn book. I keep trying to come up with these stories and everyone always says that they already are something, like a movie or a sitcom episode. “You…
Fiction: Andrea Kneeland’s “Side Effects”

Scene 73: Check-in When no one is looking, I pry nails from the wall with my bare hands and I tuck these in my pockets. When they ask if I have any sharp objects with me, I hand them the nails. I got them here I say. They were in your wall I say, which…
Wendy J. Fox’s novel The Pull of It, reviewed by Mary Anne Bordonaro

In her novel, The Pull of It, Wendy J. Fox tells the story of Laura, an unemployed young woman from Washington with a husband, Julian, and little girl, Anne, who travels to Turkey on what was meant to be a short, solo vacation to rest and reevaluate her life. What started as a two-week escape…
Fiction: “Roll for Damage” by Hannah Thurman

We cared deeply that people thought we didn’t care what people thought about us. We all wore black T-shirts during Spirit Week’s “white T-shirt day.” Of course we all had black T-shirts. As members of Carmichael High School’s Sci-fi Club (pronounced “skiffee”), we printed our own black T-shirts each fall with the year on them…
Poetry: “Laurentian” by Ashely Adams

I want to be cinders and paddle-wake,birth-warm to the touch. But I am not a metal vein,and this sea who plays at youth—trapped in August or October.It doesn’t matter when: the storm always white-cap scales and copper-greenbleeding fangshook and drag mepast sturgeon’s diamonds. Down, down to the kingdom of 32 degrees.Thrones of ore-sunk ship,a crown…
Poetry Review: Emily Brown Reads Lunch Portraits by Debora Kuan

In Debora Kuan’s Lunch Portraits, the everyday is silly, surreal, and biting. There is an abundant playfulness, both of language and subject matter, style and execution. In these poems, Kuan blends tongue-in-cheek references to movies, childhood memories, and medical maladies in ways both stunning and heart-warming (and at times, nausea-inducing). At the center of these…