Author: Heavy Feather

New Poetry: “Stature” by Albert Hwang

When I was eleven I made a statueof my grandfather. My teachersaid we could pick anyone.Most of the boys picked quarterbacks. I painted his hair whitebecause I didn’t have gray.I asked my teacherhow to do his skin.She said, “Yellowlike you.” I lookedat my own handconfused. How did she knowwhat my last name 黃 meant? Something…
Haunted Passages Flash Fiction: “Message from a Forlorn Mad Scientist” by Rachel Sterling

There was no way of telling where the messages were coming from exactly. Many attempts were made with sonar locating technological methods to zero in on their mysterious origin but to no avail. Dr. Alison McGillicuddy from the Linguistics Department had been classifying and analyzing the highly unusual sentence structures in these messages which repeatedly…
New Hybrid for Side A: “Like the Air Is a Needle” by Kate Catinella

So the kids turn it into some sort of game with a lot of screaming. “How many balloons did you” POP AHHHHHHH “Did you say you bought again?” “Fifty, but it was a deal where you” POP AHHHHHHH “Let’s just say” POP AHHHHHHH “Let’s just say there was a lot for the taking. Had to…
New Hybrid: “Mother, Madre, Mamma, Mom” by Chiara Reali

My mother is the text. I cannot enter her.Kate Zambreno, Book of Mutter The notebook begins like this: search for death rattle. Search for: death rattle, translation. Search for: rantolo terminale. The notebook is blue and green and pink—a blue background, green cacti, pink flowers. It begins on May 22, two days before the death…
New Side A Short Story: “Nobody Cares” by Jacob Austin

Finding himself with a rare Tuesday off, Laramie decides to catch a movie. He had been told the local theater offered five-dollar matinees on Tuesdays, and while there is not anything playing he particularly wants to see, he had been at Target the other night and smelled the popcorn from the snack stand and has…
Five Poems by Jenny Grassl for Haunted Passages

These poems are based on my engagement with The Thunder, Perfect Mind: a poem written by an unknown woman from Egypt in the fourth century. Pagan and Christian ideas were merging and transforming in the divinities of the goddess Isis and Virgin Mary at this time. The epigraphs are taken from the Egyptian poem, and…
Haunted Passages: “Audrey Hepburn,” an Autofictional Dreamoir by Meghan Lamb

(A dreamoir inspired by Wendy C. Ortiz) I wake with a sharp pain behind my eyes, the kind that makes it difficult to open them. I rise in a fog of headache and blurred vision, taking careful, tender steps around the apartment. The apartment is a strange amalgam of familiar spaces, other spaces I’ve lived…
“Carved with Longing”: A Conversation with Lauren C. Johnson, Author of The West Facade, by Kathleen J. Woods

Lauren C. Johnson’s rescue dove Schooner is perched on her knuckles, eyeing me through the Zoom interview screen. “He’s bonded into a really hands-on bird. See? I can just scratch his little neck now, and I never used to be able to do that.” Johnson continues, “I think he sees us as part of his…
“Explorers of Realms”: Joe Aguilar on Ryan Habermeyer’s Novel Necronauts

Science fiction and Mormonism were born together. Scholar Gillen D’arcy Wood explains how the same volcanic eruption that sent Mary Shelley indoors to write Frankenstein, thus inventing science fiction, also displaced Joseph Smith from Vermont to New York where he received his First Vision, thus inaugurating a new religion. Like the Mormon pioneers who fled…