Richard's bio
Richard Manly Heiman received his MFA Writing in 2016 from Lindenwood University. Since then he has completed a Diploma in English Literature with the University of Cambridge, where he was privileged to write essays on film versions of Alice in Wonderland and an ecological theory-based comparison of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer's The Knight's Tale.
Richard has written mainly poetry with some brief (flash) fiction, and has been published online and in print by various literary journals including Rattle, Sonic Boom, Riggwelter, London Grip, Vestal Review, and many more. Representative works follow below.
Sample Poetry
Old Growth
(First published by Spirit Fire Review)
There's a fog round the yew tree. As if the mists of Hag's Head could rise sudden from the bark and suck you from your toes up, up and over the sea in a coracle of forget. Only the memory of lead holds you groundward. Only invoking a Name keeps you from sinking into that black loam, drawn like a dowser's rod to watery sleep.
One thousand five hundred yews make a hedge maze. One thousand more make a journey. A yew sprang once from the grave of a poet's daughter. Its branches yearned far for another's, planted in her lover's corpse. At St. Mary's churchyard a gale carried leaf, twig and roots twined with bones to the turf. Thirty burials fed that old green man, thirty saints sang for his dying.
Each grove hides a blue-painted priest in its shadows, where dead wood rebirths and shoots gather in deep-mouthed skulls. Every nest of a songbird, left bare in the yew boughs, gives rise to the rarest of trilling. Every prayer chanted soft in the shade of the yew is answered with whispered amens.
_____________________
Gunsels Need Not Apply
(First Published by The Five Two)
Distraught blonde bombshell seeks detective. The usual tropes. Cheating husband gone missing. Accounts emptied. Late night tires squealing. Shady customers with accents lurking near garden wall. Can’t leave town.
You-- snubnose type private dick. Sardonic, witty repartee required. Steep shouldered. Cliff-like jaw with two-day stubble. Aqua Velva or Old Spice. Sharp dresser or a little disheveled— silk jacket black oxfords and loose-knot tie ending well north of high belt line. Beer bourbon or scotch you’re poised and when you slap a minion he stays slapped. You'll saunter in pick up the tab you’re equally quick with fists wisecracks a rough supple kiss or to give a gal a light.
Me-- apple honey dripping through silhouettes. Stubbornly high breasted. Keep lipstick eyeliner mascara décolletage just so, even in heaving sobs or violent struggles. Stiletto heels a tell-tale giveaway from alley or street level below your run-down-office window. Husky whisper, signature alto laugh. May or may not change hair color daily. Either from old money New Orleans or nouveau riche Houston-- you pick. Calculated histrionics always perfectly on cue. Will keep you waiting, nursing your drink. Possibly homicidal potentially that girl on your arm at Santa Anita or Lawry’s.
Hasty discretion essential. Call number inside Ernie’s matchbook cover for rendezvous. John’s Grill, always sunset.
Sample Flash Fiction
Ascending Decent
(First published by Bop Dead City)
I have prayed. I have promised God. I have cried scalding tears of repentance. But since I was a little girl, I’ve known I was different. And when I was eight years old I gave in to my yearning.
Cook was preparing a brace of chickens for our dinner. I peeked in and saw her busily hacking with her cleaver, the cutting board covered with legs and breasts and entrails. When she left the kitchen for a moment I seized my chance. I stole one of the hearts and ran upstairs to my room. Fearing detection, I quickly gulped my treasure down. Exquisite, the slick myocardium against my teeth. The ineluctable chewiness of it! I savored the sweet juice. I licked it from the corners of my mouth.
This soon became my habit. I relished days when again I had the chance to snatch a liver or neck and gobble it raw. Partridge and pheasant, duck and grouse, all passed my lips uncooked. But it wasn’t long before the clotted blood of market fowl and hours-old game grew cloying. I craved wilder meat. I fought my urge for months, until the day I found our tabby cradling a fresh killed sparrow in our orchard. I looked about and, unobserved, grasped the cat gently by the back of her neck. I pried her prize away. The taste of feathers mingled with delicate bones and gristle and tiny eyes was indescribable!
Then I surrendered to utter ornithophagia. I had to have the living / dying flesh on my tongue to know real bliss. Fortunately, our estate is large and there are many residents and visitors in our trees and shrubs and ornamental grasses. Finches and starlings, robins and jays, a baby owl, once I even caught a hummingbird mid-flight with a net. I lure them with seed, with water baths and grubs. They are accustomed to my frequent presence. They trust me.
I know I hoard more bird-self with each catch. I wait for eider down to erupt on my legs, for my head to crest, for the bones of my wrists and ankles to grow into what they should be, must be. My parents and tutors remark on my avian mania. The governess grows distant and eyes me carefully. Still I pore over texts and drawings and ancient field guides. Words like pisiform and scapholunare haunt me. I dream of the flavor of stork and kestrel, the milky lymph of vulture.
Someday, soon, I will absorb enough from them to cross the gulf. I will erupt in plumage. Then I will leave the ground forever.
Image: Young girl eating a bird (The pleasure)
1927, Rene Magritte.
Image Source: https://uploads3.wikiart.org/images/rene-magritte/young-girl-eating-a-bird-the-pleasure-1927(1).jpg!Large.jpg