Category: The Last Word

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

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…
New Short Fiction: “Hurricane” by Jackie Corley

The ocean met the bay. In one hundred years, the bay wouldn’t exist at all. The twenty-mile barrier island would disappear into the Atlantic Ocean as if it had been a quaint sandbar, an untouched strip of land giving way to a cosmic blip of human joy and then faded from memory. The arrogance to…
Excerpt from Roadkill: New Fiction by Alana I. Capria

I am roadkill. I am a body bag with a crying tumor inside. I have no value beyond my womb. Put on life support, my body is cracked like a raw egg. No one cares that the shell is broken so long as the yolk remains intact. I’ve gone necrotic on the mattress; my rot…
New Prose Poem: “I read that butterflies are losing their color, becoming more muted to blend into their deforested habitats” by Vikki C.

And now they’re sending a search party out looking for wonder. It worries me—are they using the correct searchlight? Will I be missed again? These concerns keep happening—like the continuous tense of fall—bloody maples dredging an exhausted world, where the line between hidden and lost is sodden. Like my mother complaining she could never find…
New Poem: “Girls I’ve Known” by Elaine Equi

S. who even in kindergarten wore a perpetually startled look. K. who of all The Beatles loved Ringo best and claimed the boy she babysat was his illegitimate child. R. who looked like an Indian princess. You knew she’d be pregnant by junior year. B. my boss who was shorter than me, who forced me…
Three Original Poems from If Only in Combat I Find Love by Jack Nancy

So the Carnival Does Not Crash Bikini Jesus of the red hangercome down, you mangeryou’re not meant to be up thereyou poet, come down, you are a boxfor living things, cows, farm animals Picking up lines from the half head goneripping off sweaters from the should be deadnot knowing how to clean themwatering the plastic…
New Poem by Jiwon Choi: “Reading About Prince’s Movie While Conjuring the Sunday Times Crossword and Rote Learning ‘Postcolonial Love Poem’ by Natalie Diaz”

Quest Love calls Ezra Edelman’s nine hour sequence of the Beautiful One looking quiet punching out muses speaking in koans while embracing lace “a cultural service” for Black men We’re in junior high and our parents are too busy to notice we’ve cut school to see a movie at the Olympia movie theater on the…
New Poem by Steven Alvarez: “gelatin silver”

argument w. words less obscure than these bodies in apartments just like these— w. fears like anybody wd have in times as charming—& soft skin & walls doing lousy keeping down wind w. words written w. light into verses i. black & white Y behind X Y’s face contoured & pressing to back of X’s…