Author: Heavy Feather

Haunted Passages: Two Poems by LM Brimmer

Un-Imagined Mother n. • I dreamt a baby again • the morning after my empty womb evolved through the limitless contraction • Mother ? I can’t. Mother I can’t. • just your painful, irreverant abdomen, halfling eye half cortex • accustomed to the gut of a wolf • grieflonging has grayed me • Mother of…
Fiction Review: Al Kratz Reads Ben Tanzer’s Novel The Missing

Parenthood can be rife with worst case scenarios, all of them truly the worst. It’s a state I was blissfully unaware of when I was a young father still set in youth’s phase of invincibility, but now that I’m a grandfather, I often worry about higher stakes. All those potential worst cases now hovering around…
Natalie Marino: Two Poems for Haunted Passages

If I Were a King I could believe in God. I would wish the grapefruitheld in my handcould turn into a little sun. I would refuse to seethat everything born before me was already gold,that even wealth can’t stop a daughter from cryingat the sight of a hardened rose. If I were a king,I wouldn’t…
New Side A Nonfiction Essay: “Butt Stuff” by Florence Fishburne

Butt Stuff —for Willy Woodcock THE BEGINNING: MEETING W SPD (shits per day): 4-5 I might’ve been wiping my ass and watching a film from the Criterion Collection on my phone when I first matched with him. W. That’s not how they all start. There are others. But he was special. Is. Thin eyebrows that…
“A Field Guide to Our Precarious Hive”: Robert Glick Reads Shena McAuliffe’s Short Story Collection We Are a Teeming Wilderness

Shena McAuliffe’s third book, the inventive and quietly powerful story collection We Are a Teeming Wilderness, acts as a field guide to characters who devote themselves to systems of belief—a business model, a pseudo-science, a taxonomy of the body—at odds with their lived conditions. The friction between the imaginary and the real, however, isn’t particularly…
Three Original Prose Poems by Michael Robins

On Solitude What can only be a perfect phrase, hurried on the back of a receipt, subsequently caught in the wind & flown forever away. Your eyes are not what they were, imperfect & especially in the morning before gravity once more proves us little. First to sit in the reglazed tub, its waters rise…
Haunted Passages Nonfiction: “Leap” by Karen Crawford

It was a number you didn’t want to celebrate, but of course, I surprised you. A room at the “castle on the hill” with its California bungalows, French-style turrets, and an old school New York Park Avenue vibe. It was the infamous penthouse suite 54. It was famous people undercover. It was too much champagne.…
“The ‘secret / undulating form’ of Erin Marie Lynch’s Collection Removal Acts”: A Poetry Review by Michael Collins

Drawing its title from the American legislation promulgating the severing of multiple Native American nations from their homes, Erin Marie Lynch’s debut collection deeply inhabits psychological tensions of the sort that those who undertook the original Removal Acts could not. A Dakota descendant, Lynch’s perspectives on this legacy are also informed, in part, by the…
Poetry Review: Ben Tripp Reads Richard Loranger’s Collection Mammal

The latest poetry collection from multi-genre writer, performer, and artist Richard Loranger should be read aloud whenever possible. It is fit for the acoustics of any space: an outdoor park, a busy street corner, commercial flights, bars, art galleries. In one moment, the work jets out lines of willful cacophony: “a beaming lump of ectoplasm…