Author: Heavy Feather

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…
Three Poems by Paul Chuks

Self-Portrait with Less Anxieties Lord, I want to be Hollywood-cool.That young boy whose father ownsA company—and wills it over toHim at twenty-one.Once—I needed bread—I went to theBlock industry to mold some.Two coins they paid me—finishedafter the economy swallowed itduring my lunch time. Thenext day—I took a knife to mythroat in mistaking myself amartyr for capitalism.…
Like a Drop of Ink in a Downpour, memories of Soviet Russia by Yelena & Galina Lembersky, reviewed by Alexandra Grabbe

After reading Like a Drop of Ink in a Downpour by Yelena & Galina Lembersky, I felt as if I had run the gantlet and stumbled out the other side with bruises all over my body. Why? The authors document the harsh reality of life in the Soviet Union before the end of the Cold…
Simultaneities & Lyric Chemisms, Futurist poetry by Ardengo Soffici, reviewed by Daniel Barbiero

Ardengo Soffici—poet, painter, art critic—only spent a short time as a Futurist, but it was a particularly fruitful time. His initiation into Futurism was unconventional. As critic for the influential Florentine journal La Voce, in spring of 1911 he saw a number of Futurist paintings in an exhibition at La Mostra d’Arte Libera in Milan.…