The Devil Beats His Wife
When the devil beats his wife,
rain and sunshine fall together.
Hell’s housewife knows her husband’s days
are few—the rain falls rain on sun on rain.
The devil’s a mobster, a debt collector—
his wife waxes hell’s nine floors,
washes its sooty windows.
It’s a house of slamming doors.
But slowly she learns not to flinch
when he crashes through the kitchen—
a woman knows when a man
is at the end of his rope.
She knows his oily well is nearly dry—
and so’s the sky.
Apocalliope
The silt that settles at the bottom of the stream Emma Galloway Stephens is a neurodivergent poet and professor from the Appalachian foothills of South Carolina. Her poems have appeared in The Windhover, Red Branch Review, Door Is a Jar Literary Magazine, The Christian Century, and many others. She is a co-founder and the Educational Director of Arbor Institute for the Arts in Greenville, SC. Read more at egstephenspoetry.com. Image: pinterest.com Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
feels like the future.
I press my fingers into it,
hoping it will speak.
Is foresight
a gift or an instinct? Under my hands, the world
breathes, its chest rattles.
She is ragged.
The flickering lightning that stirs the fish
whispers something like deliverance.
The waters curl like turning pages,
chapter by chapter, rising to my one white eye.
My song is just another ripple in the river’s book
of waves, an echo in the caves, the hum
of a hoarse harbinger.
I can’t shake the electricity
that bleached my eye, made me Apocalliope.
Heavy Feather Review 