Author: Heavy Feather

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…
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…
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…
Side A Hybrid Piece: “Early People” by Jeffrey Hermann

Early People Early people looked at stars and just had no idea. Then someone had an idea. They drew it on a cave wall with a burnt stick. Meanwhile, I’m eating Sun Chips from a machine. If I had to explain the world to paleolithic humans I’d take them someplace quiet and wait for an…
“shattered,” a poem by Carina Solis

it’s like we’re flickering, burst lamplights smirking in the dark. faces gaunt, we lounge on a half-shaded stairway, the moon and its smile hanging over our emptiness, crooked as burnt cigarettes. we pant smoke into the horizon and watch haze cut into our skin: all we taste is desperation. in the play of our lives, the night is a blackened man with…
Fiction: “My Dinner with a Thief” by David Luntz

I was looking for something for my wife I couldn’t afford. That’s when I first saw her. A younger-looking version of my wife. A customer had left a diamond brooch on the glass top and she pocketed it like a Three-card Monte pro. Her gray eyes clocked mine and said: No one likes a snitch.…
Book Review: Adam Camiolo on Boundless as the Sky by Dawn Raffel

“You need humans to do what humans can’t do.” Dawn Raffel’s newest work of compact prose and deep imagination, titled Boundless as the Sky, is a sincerely humane response to one of postmodernism’s most abstract masterpieces. It’s a powerful story. The book is a web of vignettes directly patterned after Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and…
Call Me Spes, poems by Sara Cahill Marron, reviewed by Jonathan Harrington

Some poets settle into a voice and use it over and over again. But in her new book, Call Me Spes, Sara Cahill Marron admirably experiments with another kind of poetry altogether different from her previous, more lyrical book, Nothing You Build Here, Belongs Here. Born in Virginia but currently living in New York, her work…
Poetry: “Sky Burial” by Summer J. Hart

In my dream about water, I hover over a starless nothing, refusing to go in. Refusing to let tomorrow turn out like today. Sky broke. White plate. Picking porcelain out of the carpet. The phone rings. Rain churns the southwest corner of the basement into mud. In my dream about water, the waves swallow the…