Category: The Last Word

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

Poetry: “A Non-Apology” by Katie Chicquette Adams

—for Sarah, “The Lion,” interpreter for American forces in Iraq Look, I’m really sorry there are terrifying people in your hometown who want to kill you because you helped me, that’s some rotten luck, for sure, but I gotta look out for me now. Me and mine, y’know? You’re taking this personally— it’s not…
Fiction: “Kirk and Anna Lee Just Disagree” by Vic Sizemore

After Anna Lee told her husband Ridvan she was leaving him, he got himself transferred back home to Meadow Green. To try and work things out. Suddenly he was no longer gone weeks at a time, but was always fucking home, always trying to get them to do things as a goddamned family. It was…
Three Poems by Heikki Huotari

CONSTITUENTS You are a good god yes you are (what I call love does not exist) so get me some constituents and fast. It’s always all about the U-turn, no? There is no wind, there is no spit. If we were Mars and Venus, exponentially decaying, and if half of us were gone, would we…
Fiction: Deena ElGenaidi’s “Attached”

Alison had gotten attached and couldn’t move, her body sticky, like someone had super glued her to the bed, to the sheets that smelled of laundry detergent, smelled like him. She tried to sit up but felt like if she lifted her body, her skin might peel right off, sticking to the sheets, leaving her…
Two Poems by Jennifer Conlon

Menagerie of Sexual Assault Fish have evolved to have four different types of mouth based on their feeding habits. * Disgusting animal. * The four types are terminal, superior, inferior, and protrusible. The 45th man to preside our country has a mouth type somewhere between inferior and protrusible. * I just start kissing them. It’s…
Fiction: Nick Kocz’s “How It Ends”

Under the radar was how Cole Wilkinson flew, publishing a second-tier alt-right news site that was all but unknown to those cucks who followed only mainstream media sources. However, in the year after he urged his readers to elect a narcissistic sociopath to the presidency, the website grew in popularity, almost overnight becoming fringe conservatives’…
Poetry: Jeanette Beebe’s “The Pallbearers”

“His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being—you know, shot. That was reported, and nobody talks about it. I mean, what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting?” —Donald Trump on Fox News, May 2016 As Kennedy was laid to rest in Washington with…
Essay: “Proving Our Salt” by Sarah Fonseca

From the beginning, there was a lot of talk about his hands; so much that a particularly religious eavesdropper might’ve mistaken a conversation about him—transpiring during Easter, Ascension, or an average Friday train commute—for one about his antithesis, the martyred Jesus Christ. Coined by the clairvoyant writer Graydon Carter in 1989, “the short-fingered vulgarian” nickname…
Fiction: Katie M. Flynn’s “A Gift from Your Leader”

On the night of the election, I write a little satire piece about Trump involving Russian-speaking elves, hit send, and the next morning I’ve got an acceptance letter waiting in my inbox! Six weeks later, I have twelve more Twitter followers, and there’s a pair of shoes waiting for me outside my apartment door. The…