Author: Heavy Feather

“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.…
Review: Eric Williams on Can Xue’s Experimental Novella Mystery Train

There is a letter that Dante wrote to his patron, the powerful warlord of Verona Cangrande della Scala, in which the poet explains that, with regard to his work, “… non est simplex sensus, immo dici potest polysemos, hoc est plurium sensum,” meaning, roughly, that his Comedy “… hasn’t a simple meaning, rather it can…
The PornME Trinity, the 2nd Edition of David Leo Rice’s novella, reviewed by Dave Fitzgerald

Though I haven’t ever been able to source the original quote, Chuck Klosterman once shared a borrowed sentiment which has endured, for me, at least as strongly as anything else he’s ever written (and I’m a pretty big fan). The quote of the quote, from I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains, reads as…
Poetry for Flavor Town USA: “In Foil” by Kath DeGennaro

It’s something about the way you have to hold it in your handsthe way your mother might have made you onebefore she let you become out of her reach. When I see people eating sandwiches in public I cannot look away. It’s something about how you can eat it standing upwith your neck pushed forwardprimalor…
Two Poems by Vincent James Perrone from The Future

Autobiography of Dust I’m leading a quiet life in my dark apartment | searching for Higgs Boson in the company of stray fireworks | from May to October | waiting for old habits to expire | with the annuals and cut-rate stars | and the apartment | is more the linger of seasons | the…