Author: Heavy Feather

Don’t Look at Me, a new novel by Charles Holdefer, reviewed by Jonathan Harrington

Charles Holdefer has lived in Europe for over forty years, mostly in France and Belgium, yet his fiction most often returns him to his native Midwestern U.S. In his latest novel, Don’t Look at Me, the main character is a six-foot nine-inch ex-basketball star and Masters’ student in Literature named Holly Winegarten. Holdefer, who is mainly…
Side A Visual Poetry: “bye, see you soon” by Jonathan Memmert

bye, see you soon bye,see yousoon maybebefore you knowit one of us will run across each others pathsanother day another nighttime, is any of it guaranteed?next time, old phrase built to lastthe trick is not to let it get to you toomuch as we exist in a work in progressa sleight of hand each unfolding…
“A Hallucinatory Clarity”: Marcus Pactor in Conversation with Angela Woodward

Angela Woodward works both unlikely and widely known history into her slim fictions. In her new novel, Ink, she weaves together (among other things) the origin of PDFs, the transcripts of Abu Ghraib detainee testimonies, the life and work of Francis Ponge, and the strangely moving lives of typists. The result offers a brief, memorable…
Miriam Gershow: “Nature Stories,” a new nonfiction for Bad Survivalist

1. The GPS gets us lost on the way to the boat launch. We backtrack and I take out Google Maps on my phone. We argue, but familiarly. My husband says he’ll know it by sight. I tell him when he’s on the wrong road, but get left mixed up with right. Turn here, I…
“Fugitive,” a new poem for Haunted Passages by Douglas Cole

These junkyards at the edge of cities,towers of wrecks, cars with bloodstill on the driver seat, the windshield—I am looking for a water pump, a new heart. The raw road, the gravel pit,the trailer where I get my insurancefrom a salesman heavy with gold chains.No one around here remembers rain. I am a drive-through ghost.Aren’t…
Poetry from The Future: “An Odyssey to the Sun with a Key to a Building Littered with Danger and a Sign Saying No Unlawful Entry” by Micah Zevin

The black holes are multiplying, the suns are exploding, human space debrishas been found as we imagine megastructures on earth, habitable, uninhabitable,planets protecting all flora, fauna in a dwindling and decaying future. Theadvertisements 3-D pop-ups, bots, spam risk calls, pulsated on all devicesso you must decline all calls or texts purported to be selling high…
“White Girls with Cornrows,” a Side A short story by Brent Joseph Johnson

White Girls with Cornrows I first came across Amber and Ashley while I was working at Ego’s maybe six or seven years ago. Both as the doorguy and the barback. At the time I wasn’t at a good place in my life and I eventually had to quit because of how shitty it all got…
Haunted Passages: “The Gold-Eyed Plague,” a short story by Sophie Panzer

The girls arrived on a bad wind like blight and ate up our lives like locusts. Some of us believed they were a divine punishment for gay marriage and transgenders in bathrooms. Others blamed climate change (this happened in a swing state). Only a few of us realized they probably had something to do with…
Fiction from The Future: “The Prank Caller” by Will Musgrove

Door flopping like an unknotted robe, Mrs. Robinson’s refrigerator sprinted past my living room window. Two human-esque legs powered the appliance down the street. The screams on the other line faded, and a few seconds later Mrs. Robinson herself zoomed by, collecting her milk and eggs as she gave chase. I hung up the phone.…