Category: The Last Word

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

Essay: Erin Gunther’s “On Dancing”

I watched the two of them dancing on the table, my father sitting on the couch opposite the spectacle, looking utterly horrified. My mother was dancing with a mutual friend of my father’s, Helene. They had been drinking all night. I was only nine years old and had not often been around drunken adults. My…
Three Poems by Jess Smith

COMPLCT Long taught silence, long known loud. I’ve read we’re ripe for revolution. What’s it like (this is what it’s like) to watchthe world navel-split, umbilical and sticky with citrus? We shake hands, each as viscous as the next, each chin dribbled with what we swear we haven’t eaten, or were not finger-fed. Lipstick on…
Poetry: “Holiday Advisory” by Jude Marr

A Christmas candle is still a candle if you light it any other day. When the power goes out, a candle gives off enough light to let a person feel they still exist. A candle is always dangerous. Strike a match. The smallest spark is potential conflagration. A cigarette can be Christmas if you spray…
Poetry & Art Sequence: “Big Enough to Step Inside” by Xan Schwartz

Gemini Rising/Poem for Nellie It was your birthday and Iknew you and I didn’t know you. Your skin was glowinglike a cloud You were surviving to the tune of light beer to the tune of raspberries and a couple of cows to the tune of Joan of Arc’s head tilt You were singing loudly…
Three Poems by Chelsea Bayouth

Heritage I am running with this package through the click-clackity of cobblestones + looking behind me as the wind blows my hair across my face + my eyes are wild + glisten + the sun is setting + I am scared and running. The city is a grind of buildings, such loud buildings that I…
Poetry: Abigail Welhouse’s “Unavailable”

Abigail Welhouse is the author of Bad Baby (dancing girl press), Too Many Humans of New York (Bottlecap Press), and Memento Mori (a poem/comic collaboration with Evan Johnston). Her writing has previously been published in the Heavy Feather Review (Issue 2.2), The Toast, The Billfold, Ghost Ocean Magazine, Yes, Poetry, and elsewhere. Subscribe to her Secret Poems at tinyletter.com/welhouse. Author photo cr. Gregory Crosby
Essay: “A View from Across the Pond” by Claudia White

Donald Trump’s first year in office as seen by an American living in Ireland. 01/04/2017 Donald Trump will be the President of the United States in less than three weeks. This horrifies and scares me but mostly makes me sad. I make jokes about him dying in bed but then my daughter says, “Pence…
Poetry: “November 8, 2016” by Leah Tieger

My host hands me the cast of a dinosaur’s bone. It was takenfrom the knee of an adolescent apatosauruswhich is like he says, a brontosaurus. The cast is brown, rough striations like and unlike wood, like and unlike stone. Numbers on the TV screen change red and blue. Their silent siren lights. How did you…
Six Poems by Jill M. Talbot

Infinite Jest I’m sleeping under the bedin solidarity with the monsters,I’m sleeping in a shedin support of the fraudsters. Dan Magnan,Tonight I’m going homeless,got a new pair of socks,got every hipster on her kneesfrom Kamloops to Fort Knox. Bob Dylan,The SkyTrain stops at Hornby,Rupert and King Edward,I’ll sleep with all you wannabeswith whiskey on the…