Author: Heavy Feather

New Side A Flash Fiction: “Whereupon” by Jon Doughboy

Whereupon because I’ve always wanted to start a story with the word whereupon will arrive the story: let’s say it’s about a man and a woman and the man likes to sing, is compelled to sing because hearing his voice echoing in the world tells him he’s alive, little ditties of off-key affirmation resounding in…
Poetry for Flavor Town USA: “Ode to Oil” by Sarah A. Etlinger

To the hot oil sizzling in the pan as I stand hereand make dinner, chicken cutlets, fish cakes, latkes. To the oil that burns and chars the panso I have to scrub it clean, scour black scars, and dump the remainsin an old coffee can kept under the sink like my mother did,to its scent…
Fiction Review: Nick Stock & F. Tony Carusi Read Roy Goddard’s Morant

The teacher is a figure with whom we are all familiar. They are those who sacrifice, those who love, those who endure. In fact, we may say the teacher is precisely the vessel into which we pour our moral commitments for the world as we wish it to be, even as we increasingly fail to…
Fiction Review by Catherine Parnell: “When We Are Known, or A Brief Natural History of Women by Sarah Freligh”

Every universe has its ruler, a tool that inches toward an unquestionable, crowning truth. Such is the case with Sarah Freligh’s A Brief Natural History of Women, her collection of flash fiction, some flash clocking in at a quarter of a page, others slightly longer, but all equally satisfying in their landings. If veritas is…
New Side A Fiction: “Her Fight” by Andrea Marcusa

Her Fight After she got the news, Emily went home, sank into bed, and tried to figure out where all her fight had gone. Some of it went toward her super, Sal, of course, the corrupt, bribe-taking, slime ball. The one with the ski house upstate. Emily remembers confronting him in her flooded apartment, after her…
“our more or less common ground”: Michael Collins Reads Sherod Santos’ The Burning World

Sherod Santos’ tenth collection, The Burning World, is an extended meditation on conflicts ranging from martial to internal, involving everything from globalism and technology to classical literature. Various metaphors and devices reincorporate and complicate throughout the sequence, allowing us to see into the psychological subtleties at their roots. “Having Already Invented the Greeks,” opens on…
“Bruce Lee Does the Cha Cha with My Grandmother in the Seventh Level of the Underworld,” a Haunted Passages poem by Vincent Antonio Rendoni

Often, I think of a young Lee Jun-Fan—just a student at the University of Washington—in the days before he met his wife, entering his prime. I see him swinging his elbows, pushing out hipswith Abuela, also new, out of place& foreign to Seattle at the time. Together, they move up and downthe smoke-filled parlor above…
New Poetry for Flavor Town USA: “Coordinates: Kool-Aid Arctic Grapes” by Avery Gregurich

A slight delicacy: supermarket green grapes covered with Kool-Aid powder, frozen solid, a real “Welcome to Wisconsin” moment where otherwise broke down supper clubs mark the towns, or where they once were. Flavor is preference, but Strawberry Kiwi is best. I had them in Madison the week they’d just culled seventy-two geese and donated their…
Fiction Review: Al Kratz Reads Benjamin Drevlow’s Testament The Book of Rusty

Benjamin Drevlow’s The Book of Rusty is unlike any other. It’s 390 pages of raw Rusty, a young man’s “mem-wah” about his coming-of-age struggles. Rusty is the outsider looking in, dealing with the loss of his older brother to suicide. Subtitled Another Testament of Benjamin Drevlow, it’s one hell of an intense testimony. Rusty is…