Author: Heavy Feather

Fiction: Joe Baumann’s “A Paper House”

When we knock on your door only a week after your husband’s suicide, flashing our badges even though we don’t need to, telling you we’re here to check the walls for the girl’s body, the fact that you don’t even flinch makes us fall in love with you again. You step out of the way,…
Dana Diehl’s Our Dreams Might Align, reviewed by Eshani Surya

We assume we are closer to other people than to nature. Maybe because we congregate in cities, maybe because we have perpetuated myths about how unlike animals we are. In Our Dreams Might Align, Dana Diehl challenges our notions of separation/connection, particularly in regards to the natural world. Diehl’s universes are ones of magic and…
Fiction: Fortunato Salazar’s “Don/Juan”

When I hit rock bottom, I talked Marissa into the Magic Chef tattoo. It would hurt, the tattoo artist said. Most painful location you could choose. Didn’t matter, the Magic Chef left her no choice. Now I’d like to introduce my Bible study group: Rick, Moose, Andre, Dave the Hammer. Take the shortest route to…
“Listening to the Reverberating Voices in Algaravias: Echo Chamber by Waly Salomão”: A Poetry in Translation Review by Jayme Russell

“I swim in the great open book of the world.” —Waly Salomão In Algaravias: Echo Chamber, Waly Salomão’s writing contains a multitude of references, or echoes, other writers, languages, and stories from around the world. He includes modern voices like Wallace Stevens and Paul Celan, but running throughout the book is an underlying retelling…
Poetry: “Civil War Re-enactment: Kure Beach, NC, January 2017” by Suzzanna Matthews-Amanzio

The artillery drumfire of a civil war re-enactment—a frenzy of smallbirds, cries syncopated, rise—scattershot from the twisted branches Trees lie beyond the dunes—Carolina live oak—from the beach we seethe canopy stunted, flat—feruled by headwinds There is history that seethes beneath the sea—that keeps lapping at theland Shading our eyes we can see the shore stretching…
Essay: “a crooked thing is a riot/a riot is a crooked thing” by Hannah Rubin

i. there was a fire last night, of course there was. news cameras love the glow of orange against a black-clad body. makes everything look hedonistic when really it’s us just fighting for our fucking lives. ii. you know milo said rape culture was a fiction? I circle the word fiction loosely with my tongue,…
Fiction: Jane Liddle’s “The Last List”

When she was born, her mom was on her back, in the hospital, confused and in a hazy pain, twilit spots scattered across her eyes. Her dad, in a different room in the same hospital, fiddled thumbs, paced to and fro, rocked back and forth, checked his watch and then checked the clock, and watched…
Fiction: Anne Valente’s “Like the Light of Blue Water”

The voices came again, drifting through brick walls, and Simon stopped typing once more, listened through the apartment’s silence. The third time today—at least the seventh time this week—and though he distinguished the steady undulations of two voices, one male, the other female, he could not tell where they were. Sometimes they seemed to be…
Poetry: “The Beautiful Ex, Who Was Once on TV” by Kyle Kineman

I still smell the sweat of machineson your chest, the grease of your night-shiftpalm, you were always oil on canvas,a James Dean in altar boy blues. I knowI’ve looked at you too many times latelyin the photos you’ve posted. You look good—your wet white shirt outlining every church boybulge as you emerge from some Malibu…