Category: The Last Word

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

New Poetry: “Stature” by Albert Hwang

When I was eleven I made a statueof my grandfather. My teachersaid we could pick anyone.Most of the boys picked quarterbacks. I painted his hair whitebecause I didn’t have gray.I asked my teacherhow to do his skin.She said, “Yellowlike you.” I lookedat my own handconfused. How did she knowwhat my last name 黃 meant? Something…
New Hybrid: “Mother, Madre, Mamma, Mom” by Chiara Reali

My mother is the text. I cannot enter her.Kate Zambreno, Book of Mutter The notebook begins like this: search for death rattle. Search for: death rattle, translation. Search for: rantolo terminale. The notebook is blue and green and pink—a blue background, green cacti, pink flowers. It begins on May 22, two days before the death…
New Poetry: “How to Help” by Kim D. Bailey

When momma cooked supper I washedthe dishes, while my sister dried, caressingthem like a crystal ball, and we sawour unmapped futures.Babies are made this way, we clenchour teeth hold our breath hope for more, sometimesless. We got what we prayed for, morethan we expected.Momma can’t wash the dishes anymore.We wring our hands, howl at windmills, feelthe earth fall upon…
Original Poetry by Britt Bustos: “If I Were a Scientist”

would’ve made foaming volcanoes instead of tri-fold book blurbs at sixth-grade state-mandated science fairs. I would propose hypotheses on how much anxiety affects comorbidity with eating disorders, the same way I feel when chewing thin split nails could be the way I crave seaweed-stained fingers in between my teeth. holding back coughs searching for…
“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…