Category: The Last Word

Writers getting the last word. HFR is invested in elevating art by marginalized groups with this feature.

“How far the tree bends”: An Original Poem by Celia Lawren

Kill it! the children scream. A nightmare of black swirling shadows converge on the tree. They burn, hack, dismember limbs as high as they can reach, finally feeling tall. Torment is harder work than they imagine. Before darkness recedes, they run home, kids after all. With a great shudder, the tree heaves its leaves. Its…
New Poem by Holly Day: “Exhibit 421”

The heat given off by a nuclear bomb is so hot that it can bake a shadow into concrete, so that even when the person standing there, screaming, is gone, that last shadow of them standing there, screaming, can last forever and ever on the surface of a building, the way glazed tiles have lasted…
Four Cloud Visuals by Gary Barwin

Gary Barwin is a writer, musician, multimedia artist, and the author of 36 books of poetry, fiction, and essays. His novel, Yiddish for Pirates, was a national bestseller, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award (in fiction and in French translation), and won the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award. Nothing…
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…
“Ode to Howard”: Four Poetic Cloudforms by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Translated by James M. Kopf)

When the godhead, Camarupa, noble and high,flickers through the air, heavy and spry,gathers the folds of the veil, only them to toss,to enjoy the change of shapes, their loss,now gaze upon them, firm, and, as a dream away,astonished, do not trust the eyes, for they betray. Now the slight move of a power its own,develops…
Sections 63-67 from erroreum: Original Poetry by Jonathan Hobratsch

⥈ ⥈ word that ends all words aglee with me what you do not do will destroy you break me like a glass behind every poem is a poem like imagining Picasso painting his own exposed entrails ⥈ ⥈ join us join us or or die be the failure and avail it another timeI have…
New Poem by Dustin Brookshire: “For the Hetero Professor Whose Student Writes a Gay Poem, Some Workshop Advice”

So, I used cum in a poem. Yes, you know: spunk, jizz, leche, or as the medical professional might say, semen. I used cum in the poem I submitted to your workshop, a poem about how my mother demanded I stop writing gay poetry. In this poem about a poem I doubled down on the…
Two Original Poems: Sarah Fawn Montgomery

This Autistic Puts on Her Mask Because the world wantsa woman smiling louder than her voice, scripts rehearsedbecause the only answer to How are you? is Finewhich is a lie like making eye contact with the centerof someone’s forehead, manufacturing smalltalk and big gestures about the world and weather,whether or not you actually care, autistic…
New Fiction: “The Blue Refuge” by Mehr-Afarin Kohan

The yolk was orange and soft and it ran over the white, ruining the egg’s sun in the middle. The light was glaring outside the kitchen window, where I sat at the table facing Tehran’s dry ranges in the horizon. It was my first morning in the country, still jet-lagged. I was back for a…