Author: Heavy Feather

New Prose Poem: “I read that butterflies are losing their color, becoming more muted to blend into their deforested habitats” by Vikki C.

And now they’re sending a search party out looking for wonder. It worries me—are they using the correct searchlight? Will I be missed again? These concerns keep happening—like the continuous tense of fall—bloody maples dredging an exhausted world, where the line between hidden and lost is sodden. Like my mother complaining she could never find…
New Poem: “Girls I’ve Known” by Elaine Equi

S. who even in kindergarten wore a perpetually startled look. K. who of all The Beatles loved Ringo best and claimed the boy she babysat was his illegitimate child. R. who looked like an Indian princess. You knew she’d be pregnant by junior year. B. my boss who was shorter than me, who forced me…
Three Original Poems from If Only in Combat I Find Love by Jack Nancy

So the Carnival Does Not Crash Bikini Jesus of the red hangercome down, you mangeryou’re not meant to be up thereyou poet, come down, you are a boxfor living things, cows, farm animals Picking up lines from the half head goneripping off sweaters from the should be deadnot knowing how to clean themwatering the plastic…
New Poem by Jiwon Choi: “Reading About Prince’s Movie While Conjuring the Sunday Times Crossword and Rote Learning ‘Postcolonial Love Poem’ by Natalie Diaz”

Quest Love calls Ezra Edelman’s nine hour sequence of the Beautiful One looking quiet punching out muses speaking in koans while embracing lace “a cultural service” for Black men We’re in junior high and our parents are too busy to notice we’ve cut school to see a movie at the Olympia movie theater on the…
Poetry Review: Dawn Macdonald Reads Gary Jackson’s New Collection small lives

Way back in the 2010s, being interviewed by Emilia Phillips over at 32 Poems about his Graywolf Press collection Missing You, Metropolis, Gary Jackson had this to offer on the topic of superhero comics: “… I wouldn’t say comics are the equivalent of my whole life (my ten-year-old self would feel betrayed); they just serve…
New Poem by Steven Alvarez: “gelatin silver”

argument w. words less obscure than these bodies in apartments just like these— w. fears like anybody wd have in times as charming—& soft skin & walls doing lousy keeping down wind w. words written w. light into verses i. black & white Y behind X Y’s face contoured & pressing to back of X’s…
New Fiction-Memoir-Essay by Jason Dubow: “Seven Takes on Mindfulness: A Work in Progress”

Brother B., who directs Campus Ministry at the Franciscan college where I teach, asked me if I would write and record myself reading a short mindfulness message as part of an ongoing interfaith dialogue initiative. “Sure,” I said, without fully considering, I see now, the conflict between the focused awareness inherent in mindfulness and my…
New Haunted Passages Short Story by David Leo Rice: “The Ward Clerk”

One: Philadelphia, 1965 Only the Ward Clerk, Gladys van Pelt, knew the full nature of the syndrome that tore through and perhaps, in some underlying sense, generated my family, and she shared her findings with no one except those who received me in the end, when it was far too late for that knowledge to…
New Essay: “In Praise of Obscurity” by Thomas B

“I’m nobody! Who are you?” —Emily Dickinson I. Invocation: Lost Names “No, my name is lost.” So says Edgar in Act V of King Lear, a man dismantled by power and betrayal, speaking from the ruins of identity. Not a voluntary effacement but a forced disappearance. This is not the freedom of the nameless mystic;…