Author: Heavy Feather

Original Side A Short Story: “Fresh Start” by Jane Snyder

Fresh Start When the car broke down, Doug said it was the fan belt. It wasn’t a bad place to be, if it had to happen, close to a plasma center and a Union Gospel Mission. We’ll give plasma now, he said, then we’ll go to the Mission. Dakota asked why, if we’re getting…
A Haunted Passages Poem: “The Red Kickball” by Jason Melvin

We thought it’d be funnot waiting for nightfallsticky summer afternoon séancesun high up in the skyeight of us just kissing the teen yearshanging out on my back porchalways in search of a thrill and a scare We circled up discussed next movesWhen all four grandparents and your fatherare dead by time you’re eleventhere are plenty…
Poetry Review: Josh Nicolaisen Reads Fighting Is Like a Wife by Eloisa Amezcua

In her second full-length collection, Fighting Is Like a Wife, Eloisa Amezcua delivers a shockingly palpable recounting of the tragic relationship between boxer “Schoolboy” Bobby Chacon and his first wife, Valorie Ginn. The book shares its title with a 1983 Sports Illustrated article, which first highlights Chacon’s rise to fame and its effects on their…
Poetry Review: Zachary Kinsella Reads Caryl Pagel’s Free Clean Fill Dirt

Resonating with metaphysical awareness, humor, and clarity, Caryl Pagel’s Free Clean Fill Dirt is gracefully unglamorous in its foreboding, tactile verse that seeks to enumerate the material and moral decline of our planet. Pagel roots her eco-poetics in what she names “Ordinary Strata,” which service ekphrastic responses to familiar places that are in some form…
New Poetry by Cloe Watson: “Mothers”

Remember when the sky fell below our feet,time wasting at the fringes? It became the cracks we stepped on in fear and joy, slipperyin their changing. Remember the clouds, love? How they became our stepping stoneswhen we had to go separate ways, the tall hill between our homes steep with longingand real monsters. As the…
Haunted Passages Fiction: “My Acting Years” by James Pate

My acting years grew new things in me. They gave me unfamiliar words to work my mouth around with each incoming script. They lent me names through which I could expose the more fleeting instances of myself. That I was often anonymous-seeming and lacking in talent only boded well for me. If most people are…
Two Poems from The Future: William Ross

Memo to Agency: CLEAR THE DECKS _ Run desire metrics on thisnew thanato-tourism and ping me back asap _ Scramble the screen scrapers & launch theweb crawlers now _ Get me intel on any brand lift on social _ If this has legs, we’ll pry open themouths of every dead one ferrying the Styx, reach …
“Paying Attention: A Review of Lilith Walks by Susan M. Schultz” by Karin Falcone Krieger

The premise is simple: a series of short vignettes about interesting encounters while out on walks with the dog. The dog is Lilith and she is the driving force of these small fables written by her human, Susan M. Schultz. Lilith Walks is a three-year journey through a suburban neighborhood on O’ahu, Hawaii through the…
Interview with Parker Young, Author of Cheap Therapist Says You’re Insane, by Sam Heaps

Cheap Therapist Says You’re Insane, out now from Future Tense Books, is the rare short story collection that provides shockingly robust pleasure from the beginning to the end, the kind can only exist in the shadow of deep discomfort. This book is all killer, no filler. Young’s prose, without ever losing its root in the…