Author: Heavy Feather

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…
“Watching in the Dark”: Jayme Russell on Puncture Wounds Left by Tony Trigilio’s Dark Shadows

Inside the Walls of My Own House Every shadowy story should invoke the uncanny. Tony Trigilio keeps dreaming (and writing) of his uncanny space, at home with his mother in front of the television screen. Space and time billow and unfold as he remembers watching Dark Shadows and being transported to gothic Maine: an electronic…
Poetry: Chas Hoppe & Joshua Young’s “[placeholder]”

[1] [2] [3] he was a film extra for about a month,driving his Jeep around down by the viaductuntil about six in the morning each day. you ever tried to freeze-frame a vhs? she hid his parents in the gift-shop bathroomand rented a karaoke machine for his birthday.[4] do the memories expire with…
Poetry Review: Charles Theonia on Cat Fitzpatrick’s Glamourpuss

Trans self-making is fraught with cis people’s associations of deception and the desire they project onto us: our transexual prime directive to leave the past behind and enter an unrippled state of always-having been, by any means necessary. But we each have at least one self, and of course we shape them. Cat Fitzpatrick’s funny,…
“The Page 99 Test”: Tony Trigilio & Inside the Walls of My Own House: The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood), Book 2

“Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.”―Ford Madox Ford Page ninety-nine opens the final section of my new book, Inside the Walls of My Own House: The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood), Book 2. This page is a key pivot point for…