Author: Heavy Feather

Poetry for Bad Survivalist: “Three Weeks Post-op with a Lightning Bug” by Gary McDowell

Friends and family keep checking in. Keep her safe, they say. Keep her comfortable, they say. Tell her we love her, they say. And you too. Early this morning, maybe 6:30, I stand in the kitchen making her breakfast, the dogs at my side—they herd me, sun-up to sun-down, are never more than a body-length…
Poetry Excerpt: From Words in Danger of Falling Out of the Vocabulary by Eric Lindley & Joe Milazzo

Freightv.1. To inscribe, write or otherwise make marks that are to be read (more properly, read back) in non-linear fashion. To write a text that is both an Eulerian trail and a magic square.2. To mumble from the heart.3. To tabernacle under the umbels. To retire to the weeds to mildew the saccharine and honey…
The Future Has Fiction: “Scarecrows” by John Mitchell

I was only ever good at two things and being a mother wasn’t one of them. I knew how to disappear when things got hard, and I knew how to make everything worse when I showed back up. True to form, the flood came six months after I returned home. The sea levels rose so…
Fiction from the Future: “Mar-a-Lago” by Matt McBride

Everyone’s thrown a party the night before they’re butchered. Tonight’s Jannelle’s, and she stands onstage in Mar-a-Lago’s Gold and White Ballroom, holding the karaoke machine’s mic as if it were a weapon. An AI Beyonce song plays from a speaker on a tripod. Jannelle can remember about half the words. Mark sits alone at a…
Poetry from the Future: “Today Is New and Plastic” by Steve Roberts

I tuck my bubblegum under my tongueso I can drink water from my plastic cup.I need to feel both the sour tangand the deep, wet relief of being hydratedboth at once; I cannot wait for oneor the other. I put on my suit of “I don’t remember.”My suit of “The past is just a form…
Side A Poem: “Soup of the Day” by Sarah Peecher

Soup of the Day Suddenly, you find your crisp mid-April self digging through the closet for anything lightweight enough that’s not wrinkled but your summer wardrobe is an old friend you’re just warming up to and nothing seems to match the same way Saturday will be eighty degrees and sunny and Sunday will be thirty-five…
Bad Survivalist Flash Fiction: “Pillow Talk” by Christopher Linforth

Jacqueline’s gone to sort out her bleeding. I stay in bed and text my last girlfriend that I’m over her. I don’t miss you, I say, I never missed you. Even when we used to get high and steal Little Debbie Cosmic Brownies from the bodega and taste the chocolate in each other’s mouths. That…
Howie Good: Four Prose Poems for Haunted Passages

Joseph K. One evening he stopped on the sidewalk in front of the lighted display window of a little bookshop, his attention caught by the cover of a parody edition of the Kama Sutra called Kama Suture. If only he had the nerve to invest, there was a fortune to be made in ladies undergarments.…
Fiction Review: Gabriel Welsch Reads Benjamin Drevlow’s Story Collection Honky

Not quite equal parts nonfiction and fiction, the stories in Honky show the life of a young man growing up white and poor in rural “Northernass Wisconsin” who then moves to “Southernass Georgia” as an adult. His enthusiasm for spaces that, in the years he was growing up, were closely associated with Black culture—basketball and…