Author: Heavy Feather
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Poetry by Lisa Zerkle: “I’m Stopped by the Black Pearl of Her”
An elegant weapon, she’s glossy,ballistic. Her legs, articulated.But it’s the shine I notice. Light glintsoff carapace though she’s tangled ina sticky mess, a catchall of deadleaves and insects I take for cobwebnear a potted shrub. The hydrangeathat has bloomed and faded though the daysstill blaze and rattlesnaking of cicadasrises from the oaks. Her abdomen’sa precise…
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An Excerpt from Danny Joseph’s Shortish Novel Danny the Ambulance
Danny the Ambulance is a novel about a man who walks into a bar and over the course of the night realizes everyone in the bar is named Danny. The Jury Room feels like a long thin unendurable shack and the rain pouring down overtop has the cadence and impact of tiny hammers falling on…
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Poetry for Haunted Passages: Two Fassbinder Tapes by LM Rivera
This is a fragment from a forthcoming book (THE RED ABSURD). The section is THE FASSBINDER TAPES. TAPEONE He swore to all the world and to himself that he would remain decent. And as long as he had money, he remained decent. But then he ran out of money, which was a moment he had…
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“A frame for the raw moment”: Reflexes on Sarah Rosenthal’s Lizard by Alex Rieser
There is something powerful about newness, when you first hold the book in your hands, its glossy cover and particular weight. Release parties, the words of praise on the back, honest or not. Newness is a vulnerable state. The artist has sent it onto the world and the world has yet to decide if it…
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“a book is the song / of the body”: Michael Collins Reads Arthur Kayzakian’s Poetry Collection The Book of Redacted Paintings
Behind Arthur Kayzakian’s debut collection, The Book of Redacted Paintings, lies an unwritten history involving the speaker’s father, who was disappeared in the Iranian Revolution. The collection, the inaugural Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series Selection, ostensibly centers around the speaker’s efforts to recover a stolen portrait of his father, the painting itself accruing gravity to…
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New Travel Nonfiction: “To the Burmese Monks Who Asked Why My Hair Was Cut Short” by Lindsey Danis
You were not the first monks I met in Thailand, but you were the only ones I bowed to with both hands pressed together at the chin to demonstrate respect. You were two together and we were together, two married women passing for straight, but you wondered about that in the way you eyed my…
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New Hybrid Cento: “I Rewatch My Ex’s Favorite Film and Imagine Our Life Together” by Frances Klein
E—A cento of the Derek Jarman film Blue Once there are only two of us you set to work mapping the solemn geography of human limits. You are slow and deliberate, a dedicated cartographer. *** The empty book of a new year opens. I am the marble, you the sculptor. Your tool is a refined…
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Poetry for Side A: “I Don’t Know Why He Mumbles in Group” by Kevin Ridgeway
I Don’t Know Why He Mumbles in Group But he does. Maybe they are prayers forhis insanity to be extinguished. Either way,he’s always shushed by counselors for causinga distraction. He likes to offer erroneous triviaabout his favorite band, The Beatles—and healways stands corrected by others. After 30years of sobriety, the only coping skill he hasto…
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Zach Savich: Two from The Motherwell Sonnets
“. . . the purpose of abstraction in any field—art, science, mathematics—is, out of incredible richness and complexity and detail of reality, ‘to separate,’ ‘to select from’ the complexity of reality that which you want to emphasize . . .” (Robert Motherwell, “On the Humanism of Abstraction”) The Motherwell Sonnets considers what this kind of abstraction…
Heavy Feather Review 