Author: Heavy Feather

Flavor Town USA Fiction: “Definition: Love” by Winslow Schmelling

/ləv/ n.1 Origin: gas station hotdog “Remember how the attendant gave the rest of them to us for free? He hesitated for that heavy moment after we asked for two of them. I swear I saw his eyes glaze. Visions. PTSD. Memories of war. ‘You can just have them,’ he said, placing each dynamite stick into…
Side A Poem: “Anti-Ars Poetica” by Jonathan Memmert

Anti-Ars Poetica There is no poetry in a shrapnel wound that refuses to heal … No enjambment in a lifelong amputation / No metaphor inside the guns aimed & trigger cocked No simile flies from the aerial carpet bombings No alliteration as tank tracks cross borderlines No allegory hidden in a drone’s surveillance Mines laid…
“Style & Symptom”: K Hank Jost Reviews Jinnwoo’s Novella POLO

Between two burning fields, in a dying industrial village, a child’s sprint toward a coming-of-age is about to be chopped at the knees. The development of our unnamed, laconic narrator, alongside his soon-to-be ex-best friend, has fallen into the hands of a rotating gaggle of older boys. These wayward teenagers, engaging in self-harm, early drug…
Poetry for Bad Survivalist: “What a World” by Joshua Stanek

The wind did devotions through the gorge when you arrived.The sun brighter and wet seasons more bountiful. Mountain lions track deer over the swift flow of interstateson bridges made for the deer, the lion, the blackberry bush, and the bobcat with a wild hare in its jaw. You were bornupon a communication boom, you see.…
Poetry Review: Kevin Gallagher Reads The Pearl Diver of Irunmani by Marc Vincenz

Sometimes you can swim with your eyes closed and learn something. You almost have to close your eyes and get ready to breathe into Marc Vincenz’s The Pearl Diver of Irunmani. If you dive in with your eyes open they will sting and you can’t see a thing. The book is organized into six different movements,…
Poetry Review: G.H. Mosson Reads Anders Carlson-Wee’s Second Poetry Collection Disease of Kings

Within the realm of narrative poetry, Anders Carlson-Wee’s second full-length book features two purposefully unemployed, dumpster-diving male best friends, who live at the fringes of American consumer culture in a nondescript apartment, and embody a sort of DIY punk rock esthetic of not working and living off the abundance tossed into dumpsters. Told through characters…
Fiction Review: Shyanne Hamrick Reads There Is Only One Ghost in the World by Sophie Klahr & Corey Zeller

Sophie Klahr & Corey Zeller’s There Is Only One Ghost in the World may have found life in the middle of a pandemic, but their collaborative book doesn’t steep in the tedium of socially distanced landscapes. These two writers instead tie a balloon to the narrative and gaze at contemporary America from a bird’s-eye view…
Nonfiction for Bad Survivalist: “Unruly Roots” by Morgan Rose-Marie

I’ve tried to make this call four or five times this week. Now that my mother is finally on the other end, I find myself wishing I were once again hearing her voicemail greeting instead. Growing up, when I answered the house phone, the caller would inevitably launch into conversation. “I’m Morgan,” I would interrupt.…
Haunted Passages: Two Poems by Jenny Grassl

Woman’s Mappa Mundi—The Promontory Imprint a bubbling gone rogue my song summons hounds of heaven there are no sailors to risk sirens sea pig rides the waves my lap subsumes blood chambers of the deep fins of all the fathersa dead man’s float cracked and crashed by a shopping cart ship mast skews vertebrae in…