Author: Heavy Feather

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…
“Transformations in Unknowable Ways”: John Schertzer Reads John Madera’s Story Collection Nervosities

Nervosities, John Madera’s distinctive and expansive new story collection, may be categorized as postmodern, since much of its reflexive concerns and critique align with post-1968 French philosophical questions, albeit without the pomo fizz and jizz of the 1990s pop-speculative agon. The stories also betray a deep proclivity for the best of Modernism, e.g., formal and…
Fiction from the Future: “Professor & I” by Mukul

Outside, at dawn, this is same dew that was once a cloud, once a river, once a pond, once a ray of the sun, once a dust of the stars, and who knows maybe once a syllable of the Word. These ornaments of nature, ornaments of language, an exercise in style and sound and sight…
Side A Poem: “Prodigal” by Michael Juliani

Prodigal My phone rings all hoursof the night with my grandmother wanting her mother, her sister,her husband, anyone dead who still walks the housein her mind. I repeat a script my mother taught meto soothe her back to sleep, then try it on myself,ears open to the screech owls and red-crowned parrotscommingled in the blue…