Author: Heavy Feather

Haunted Passages: Six Poems from The Witch’s Flight by John Schertzer

The Witch’s Flight 1 I see you rounding the cornerwith your flag. You made it yourselffrom a table cloth, put some knobs on it, bright colorscalled yourself a beginningof something still undefined still nowhere to be foundand I am there beside youwaiting for it to happen. The Witch’s Flight 2 I saw you rounding the…
Original Fiction for Bad Survivalist: “Sugar” by Gogol

You don’t like cutting anymore. You don’t like stitching too. You are broke, mostly a failure, and the only place where they will allow you to cut and stitch is in the hospital located at the outskirts of the sugarcane field. You stay in a room at the periphery of the hospital. The women yell,…
Poetry for Side A: “At My Grandmother’s Ninetieth Birthday, My Uncle Tells Me How He Came to Accept His Bipolar Diagnosis” by Amy Saul-Zerby

At My Grandmother’s Ninetieth Birthday, My Uncle Tells Me How He Came to Accept His Bipolar Diagnosis smiles and says he realizedthat it’s actually really simple: when he takes the pills, he’s fineand when he doesn’t, he’s not. If I had high blood pressure,I’d take medication for it, he says, and this isn’t any different.A…
Hybrid Piece from the Future: “Genetic Engineering Demonstration Gone Wrong” by Bethany Jarmul

No one believed umbrellas could be grown in fields, could open their faces to the firmament like foxgloves. But I raised the curtain and revealed—to gasps of delight—a wonderful waterproof leaf-canopy with sturdy vine-shaft and real root-handle. What luck! I held it over a child’s head just as the rain roused. The crowd cheered, applauded.…
Side A Fiction: “personal electric vehicle” by Jenkin Benson

personal electric vehicle nearly september kent wheeled.kent wheeled.kent wheeled. i met him in intro to excel spreadsheets. we were assigned together. group project. three of us. i don’t really remember the other guy. i think he was from wisconsin cause he wore a graphic t-shirt emblazoned with the punchline “milwaukee: the weak are killed and…
“There Is News Along the Ohio River”: Four Hybrid Pieces from the Future by Beth Gilstrap

XVII. There is news along the Ohio river: a young man has tied his loosening jeans up with twine and huddles into his denim jacket, a bird peeking out of a nest, but the fabric may as well be a brittle photograph wet and dried a hundred times before he taped it over the crack in…
Hybrid Essay for Haunted Passages: “Over at the Frankenstein Place” by Joanna Acevedo

Over the past two weeks, please list the items you have lost. As a teenager I knew how to scam my way into the midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. They still did it at the Chelsea Cinemas, which is closed now, and graffiti adorns its sad plywood window coverings. But this was…
“When the Horrors at Home Are Scarier Than Any Monsters”: Nicole Yurcaba Reads Darrin Doyle’s Novel Let Gravity Seize the Dead

Darrin Doyle’s Let Gravity Seize the Dead invites us into a new kind of psychological horror, one that relies on brevity and compression to create the subtle scare tactics that keep us engrossed. Within the novel’s 141 pages, we uncover a trauma-laden story that examines the past, the present, and the myriad of ways one…
Poetry Review: Gina Thayer Reads Jenny Irish’s Poetry Collection Hatch

If you were to open my copy of Jenny Irish’s prose poetry collection, Hatch, you would find margins filled with penciled half-thoughts and doodles of anatomically dubious fireflies. I’m not usually one to mark up a book, but Hatch works in mysterious ways, subtly shifting how we interact with the world. Through linked prose poems…