Author: Heavy Feather

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…
“The Page 99 Test”: Laurie Stone & My Life as an Animal

“Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.”―Ford Madox Ford Damn you, Ford Madox Ford. I wanted to be done with a friend I had turned into a character in My Life as an Animal. Then I read page ninety-nine, and there she was…
“The Page 99 Test”: Joe Milazzo & Crepuscle W/ Nellie

“Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.”―Ford Madox Ford We’re standing outside a pawnshop, probably somewhere in Midtown or even Lower Manhattan. The year is 1955, autumn. We’re in the company of John, a “minor character” who may or may not be a…
Poem & Song: “Darkness Fell” by Nancy Christensen King & Alani Keiser

Darkness Fell (Poem by Nancy Christensen King) “Darkness fell, not the dark of a moonless or cloudy night,But as if the lamp had been put out in a dark room,”Wrote Pliny the YoungerAcross the Bay of Naples, a witness to the doom. At the foot of Mount Vesuvius, Italian souls laid toilBuilding on the mountainside to…
Thirteen Comics from Hello Mussolini: Carl Dimitri

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Fascie Why Satan Gonna Put Them on a Train He Only Played One on TV I Believe Exxon Mobile So Proud of You, Son They Booed the VP Voted Myself Out We Finally Get the Authoritarian Regime Real News Is Not to Be Trusted I Have My…
“Slomo croaking frogs, snow-alone steeples, pits of shoveled salt.”: Contributors’ Corner

Q: Can you share a moment that shaped you as a writer (or continues to)? What prompted your work in HFR? Katie Condon, Poetry Editor, Grist I played basketball in college. My senior year we won our conference and, appropriately, my roommates and I threw a party at our apartment for the team and anyone else…
Essay: “Do You Still Love Me If I’m White?” by Sonja Johanson

In the days immediately after the election, many of us were shocked, grieving, enraged, and struggling with the knowledge we had, for too long, been silent as our friends, neighbors, and family members took sides with bigotry. One of the first acts for many was to take to social media and declare sides publicly, announcing…
Three Poems by Sergio A. Ortiz

A Wolf “I know there’s something better down the road.We need to find a place where we are safe.”—from “Praise Song for the Day,” by Elizabeth Alexander passed by my eyesleaving his footstepsin my veins.Stealthy and hungry,he stalked the cityscrutinizing the future.Today the shutters are closedbecause in this poemthere’s a wolfcoming to get me.Even when I…