Author: Heavy Feather

Fiction for Side A: “Lazarus Goat” by Jacob Austin

Lazarus Goat The goats dawdle in the field. They show no remorse for yesterday’s incident. I had been all set to go home. Nothing to do but call the goats in, count them, and lock the gate. Mopface and Lamby, the pair of massive komondors, were lying on either side of the entrance, their lion…
“Binging an Untitled Original Series Set on Multiple Continents”: Shane Joaquin Jimenez Reads Rupert Taylor’s Novel Please Let Me Destroy You

Reading Rupert Taylor’s riotous, polyphonic debut novel Please Let Me Destroy You is like watching light reflect off a disco ball, spinning radiant, ever-shifting constellations across your mind’s eye. At turns absurdist and psychedelic, the book is an often funny, often tragic, breathless litany of (in no particular order): panic attacks, heartbreaks, humiliations, betrayals, globetrotting…
Fiction Review: Ashley Honeysett Reads Jillian Danback-McGhan’s Collection Midwatch

One of the stories in Jillian Danback-McGhan’s collection of short fiction, Midwatch, is set in the Gulf of Aden, where American troops are boarding fishing vessels, trying to catch pirates by searching for weapons and other evidence of illicit activity. Did you know the U.S. Navy did that? Any military veteran could casually talk about…
The Future Has Poetry: “How I Tell You I Love You When All Hope Is Lost” by Jeneva Stone

Displaced air arrives by force as the metro rushes the station. Your hand pressed to the small of my back and dim lights up my spine brighten north. Greens tied with a pink ribbon. Narrative hallway with endless doors without a knob or dial. Breath visible and there! grace notes ensue. greens tied with a…
New Side A Short Fiction: “Clownskin” by Brent Joseph Johnson

Clownskin One afternoon the sky above us and the sky to the side of us gathered together into a strange and terrifying pattern. So we stopped what we were doing and pointed at it. Even our power-walkers and mail-carriers, even our demons and sasquatches, even our own actual clowns pointed in perplexity. “Holy shit,” we…
Side A Poem: “Middle Pain” by Naomi Bess Leimsider

Middle Pain Up against the faceless ghost clock again. Time is of the essence. Waiting for the one-sided middle pinch, that sets it all in motion. Cycle in. Cycle out. So, so smooth the way it sheds and grows. How it all goes. The inner mechanism slows and shifts. Only able to harness stillness, can’t…
“The Dance of Self-Reclamation”: Nicole Yurcaba Reads Vincent Czyz’s Novel Sun Eye Moon Eye

At first glance, Vincent Czyz’s Sun Eye Moon Eye might seem like another daunting 500+ page novel. Nonetheless, we would do well to not only not pass judgment on this because of its cover (which is actually quite gorgeous and thought-provoking), but we should not turn away because we fear a lengthy read. Sun Eye…
Fiction for the Friggatriskaidekaphobic: “Immortal” by Stefan Kiesbye

On evenings she couldn’t sleep, she walked up the carpeted stairs and knocked on my door. Under the down comforter, my bony hips squeezed between her thighs, we listened to her husband’s snoring. Emily was richly layered and comfortable and her neck smelled of dark spices. When she was in a hurry, she knelt in…
“All Theory Is Gray”: Matt Martinson Reads Ed Simon’s Devil’s Contract and Confirms Faust and Mephistopheles Are Still with Us

The Faustian bargain, whether in the arts or reality, is alive and well in the twenty-first century. Even in our secular age, we, too, sell our souls for trivial things—e.g., buying an unneeded phone while trying not to think of the slave labor and economic destruction wrought in the collection of its components—or to evil…