Author: Heavy Feather

Big Lonesome, short stories by Joseph Scapellato, reviewed by Nick Sweeney

Joseph Scapellato’s collection is a lot of things: risky, honest, and romantic. Big Lonesome will turn your idea of the Western genre on its head, creating new thoughts, before turning again, and again. Cowboys and Indians and horses and the dust of the Old West and the New. And the weird. Especially the weird. I…
Two Poems by Carolyn Zaikowski

Summons Where do they go after the stormWhere do they go after the tideWhere do they go after they’re lostWhere do they go after the sprawl Where do they go when there’s no bridgeWhere do they go when there’s no brideWhere do they go when there’s no stationWhere do they go when there’s a mountain…
Fiction: Rachel Lyon’s “How Did He Become This Way, and Where Will He Go from Here?”

Consider a boy who compulsively writes his name on things. Maybe he starts by writing on a bathroom wall, in a hidden place where no one can see. Maybe as an elementary-schooler he carves it into the wooden surfaces of desks in school. Maybe briefly, as a teenager, he takes up graffiti. To write his name all over the…
Poetry: Amy Forstadt’s “What My Son Learns”

My son learns to readin school. His teachers are calm and cold.They teach him words like contrarianbut not denier. Alleged not false.Alt-right not wrong. My son learns math. His teachers smilewhen they’re furious.They show him two plus twoequals five. And how divisionmatters most of all. My son learns art. His teachers give him all white…
Three Poems by Julie Rouse

The Direst I’ve been the same bad dream since I was eight.Still the body its interlocutors.Pierce my ear and listen to the crunch.Stick a needle underneath my thumb.Listen to mom and dad in the next room.Listen to the Bangles Egyptian.Piss in the corner, old enough to know.Dippy puppies hump each other for fun.Out in the…
Four Crash Studies by Scott Teplin

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger size. Chopped Shadow Clamper Tire Drop Shadow Gap-Toothed Shadow Scott Teplin is an artist living in Brooklyn, New York. More: teplin.com.
Three Poems by Joseph Mulholland

Transmigration, Volume One Did you recognize the sensation of olive meat hugging its cold pit for warmth? Her blood-belly protrudes over the ruined slipstream—secrets of torn flesh pinpush in the gunshot light. The walls of this open hymnal shine jukebox-pink—she adjusts fingers under the elastic band, glassglued to inconstancy, afflicted. Your morning electric chair shrinking…
Essay: “15 Things Women Should Do When Bumping into a racist, bigot, &/or misogynist” by jacklyn janeksela

Do not devalue a list that could save your life. Feel free to follow one of more of these steps in any order; do not hesitate to follow them all. We need to support each other in any way possible. And when I say we, I am not talking about anyone in the Trump camp…
James Ardis Reviews Jarett Kobek’s Soft & Cuddly

Soft & Cuddly (1987) and its predecessor Go to Hell (1985) were horror games published on cassette tapes for what is now an obscure British computer system. The games were proudly the products of a teenager’s boredom and embraced the label “Video Nasties” that was used in the 1980s by Britain’s elite to damn subversive…