Author: Heavy Feather

Nonfiction Review: Patrick Thomas Henry Reads Kristine Langley Mahler’s Essay Collection Teen Queen Training

Readers of Mahler’s other excellent essay collections—Curing Season and A Calendar Is a Snakeskin—already know that form is clay in her hands, and she has a potter’s fine touch in shaping every word into a vessel brimming with beauty. In the case of Kristine Langley Mahler’s Teen Queen Training, equally inventive and lyrical, a master…
“The Kingdom Come Queer Gun Club and Wilderness Survival School”: A Short Story for Bad Survivalist by J. D. Schraffenberger

Early in the first summer of the president’s third term, right before Franny won the lottery, my dad died. The book club had just chosen The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey. Gus grumbled into his Cabernet that it wasn’t a queer book proper. Franny sighed. This was an old argument. The Queer Book Club…
Haunted Passages Short Fiction: “Grocery List” by Oliver Cubillos

You forgot to lock the front door. How could you be so careless? There’s an intruder in your home and it’s all your fault. Who would break into your home? Perhaps it’s the mailman or the crone next door. There’s a crash downstairs and you slide on your slippers. Maybe it’s that pesky rat. You…
New Flavor Town USA Poetry: “Eating Bugs” by J. Alan Nelson

They left me in the longleaf pines of Sam Houstonwith a paper sack of baloney, bread, three apples.In other years they would’ve been taken away in cuffs for abandonment. I ate it all by noon the first day. By the second morning the hunger had teeth.I watched Boy Scouts from the underbrush,their foil packets of…
Original Poem by Robert Frede Kenter: “Emergency Room (Triage)”

MD Predatory gestures encounter & shadow nothingness, curtain eye wear in pulse of organized logic. Bodies stripped of clothing reduce me to a system, structures, procedures. Anomie, anonymous, anatomic, a suggestive catalogue of science, entropic categorization of catatonic, predatory logic, a logos of systems, where humor is encountered. Brigands of Horror We have rooms to…
Fiction Review: Al Kratz Reads Luke Goebel’s New Novel Kill Dick

Readers entering the world of Luke Goebel’s new book, Kill Dick, should prepare to face the proverbial Good News and Bad News. On the downside, it’s a trip to the fall of 2016 when the “orange haze of doom” is not in the rearview mirror but instead steamrolling full speed ahead. An unfortunate stint in…
“A Wild Waltz”: Aimee LaBrie Reads Lisa Slage Robinson’s Esquire Ball: Stories from the Great Black Swamp

To dive into Lisa Slage Robinson’s 13 electric short stories in Esquire Ball is to enter a world where the women must use wit, vim, and chess-like precision to survive a legal landscape fraught with land mines of male ego, greed, and desire. While the stories shift in point of view and plot, a recurring…
“We Are Made of Other People’s Secrets”: Scott Ferry Reviews Lauren Scharhag’s Poetry Collection A Food Court in Hell

I am here to give people the good news about Lauren Scharhag, if you do not already know. She is a treasure of contemporary poetry; not only because she offers us our lost histories in vivid color and taste, but because she heals the exit and entry wounds as she works. She, in many ways,…
Haunted Passages Hybrid Work: “Dead Bear” by Ari Cordovero

In the kitchen, no one moves too quickly. Plates are set down with care. Chairs slide in small increments. A cabinet door is closed with the flat of a palm instead of a snap. Porcelain animals watch from mahogany shelves— a fox mid-pounce, a deer with glassy eyes, a white horse frozen in a permanent…