Author: Heavy Feather
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Bad Survivalist: “Under the Orange Tree,” a short story by Emily Unwin
“Everyone in America has an agent,” Judy says. Mary Virginia has just picked up Judy from the Seville, Spain airport. Judy sits in the passenger seat. MV is trying to sell a Christian self-help book. Her knuckles are turning white. Her boyfriend’s mother, Judy, fiddles with the meditation beads around her recently remodeled but still…
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“If I Had to Read It Again for the First Time, I Would”: Jacob Collins-Wilson Reviews Behind the Tree Backs by Iman Mohammed
Behind the Tree Backs by Iman Mohammed (translated by Jennifer Hayashida and including the full original Swedish version) is a short book of short poems that highlights imagery, nature, memories, and the strength of word-choice to create a cross-stitch of life during and after destruction. It is a book about growing up in war and…
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The Future: Excerpts from The Mergered by Matthew DeMarco
Messages from the Mergered The three mergered billionaires, who share one body, prefer that I work from a different location than them for the duration of the day, except for during our prescheduled face-to-face-to-face-to-face meetings. On our calendars, these events are sometimes abbreviated as F2F2F2F’s or F4s. Fortunately, there are numerous places throughout the Plaza…
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“A Day at the Beach,” a poem for Side A by Nicole Callihan
A Day at the Beach The nurse says I’ll likely feel okay, a little tired, very warm. Like you’ve spent a day at the beach, she says. But it’s winter in New York. After treatment, I eat two street tacos on a cold wet corner, walk to Chinatown, pay cash for burn cream. There’s a…
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New Poetry for Side A: “into the looking glass” by Sarah Aziz
into the looking glass and stumbling into you, father-land. your breath lances through me like a friday afternoon scolding.she traces my crooked nose, and cuts her fingertip on the wanton marblesswishing in your mouth. I understand you, which is to say, I am you: swaddledin a dream of pink, a moth eating into a pair…
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Review: Alexandra Grabbe on Rita Zoey Chin’s The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern
Rita Zoey Chin’s The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern is an enchanting coming of age story that sends us on a magical journey of discovery across the United States and Canada. This debut novel will grab you from the get-go. We meet Leah Fern, the “World’s Youngest and Very Best Fortuneteller.” Leah lives in a…
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Poetry: “on fictional suburbs” by evelyn bauer
Some beast prowls in this place, lurking around stacks of unused newspaper & hiding behind the corners, shrouded by the broken electric streetlights, still unfixed. The familiar stench of iodine wafts down streets & up stairways, the tarmac melting in summer sun. Watch a newt scurry & slink in the wet earth, a flash of…
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Dangerous Blues, kind of a ghost story by Stephen Policoff, reviewed by Laurie Loewenstein
In the months after my mother died, my father confided to me that he regularly talked to her. To her, not with her. Knocking around an empty house, he took comfort in telling her the events of his day—which cashier at Kroger had a new hair style, how many laps he’d done on the Y’s…
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We Are Mermaids, poems by Stephanie Burt, reviewed by Robin Arble
There’s a moment in Stephanie Burt’s newest collection I’ve read so many times I memorized it by accident. In “Love Poem with Summer Camp Reunion,” the huge and frightening freedom of camp has given the poet enough distance from her life—from helpful but clueless parents, from treacherous hallways and classrooms, cafeterias and blacktops—to encounter her…
Heavy Feather Review 