Category: The Last Word

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

Two Poems by Carolyn Zaikowski

Summons Where do they go after the stormWhere do they go after the tideWhere do they go after they’re lostWhere do they go after the sprawl Where do they go when there’s no bridgeWhere do they go when there’s no brideWhere do they go when there’s no stationWhere do they go when there’s a mountain…
Fiction: Rachel Lyon’s “How Did He Become This Way, and Where Will He Go from Here?”

Consider a boy who compulsively writes his name on things. Maybe he starts by writing on a bathroom wall, in a hidden place where no one can see. Maybe as an elementary-schooler he carves it into the wooden surfaces of desks in school. Maybe briefly, as a teenager, he takes up graffiti. To write his name all over the…
Poetry: Amy Forstadt’s “What My Son Learns”

My son learns to readin school. His teachers are calm and cold.They teach him words like contrarianbut not denier. Alleged not false.Alt-right not wrong. My son learns math. His teachers smilewhen they’re furious.They show him two plus twoequals five. And how divisionmatters most of all. My son learns art. His teachers give him all white…
Three Poems by Julie Rouse

The Direst I’ve been the same bad dream since I was eight.Still the body its interlocutors.Pierce my ear and listen to the crunch.Stick a needle underneath my thumb.Listen to mom and dad in the next room.Listen to the Bangles Egyptian.Piss in the corner, old enough to know.Dippy puppies hump each other for fun.Out in the…
Essay: “15 Things Women Should Do When Bumping into a racist, bigot, &/or misogynist” by jacklyn janeksela

Do not devalue a list that could save your life. Feel free to follow one of more of these steps in any order; do not hesitate to follow them all. We need to support each other in any way possible. And when I say we, I am not talking about anyone in the Trump camp…
Essay: “God Loves the Nasty Women” by Nancy Hightower

God Loves the Nasty Women In 2016, America came close to having its first woman president. Instead, our electoral college has given us a man who revels in grabbing women’s pussies. This unrepentant misogynist gained the White House in no small part due to the actions of evangelical right. In The Washington Post, Sarah Pulliam…
Fiction: “Sarcophagy at Mar-a-Lago” by Derick Dupre

You’ve never seen a colder bunker. Of course I got this rigged with a.c., naturally the best and coldest, ice cold as the backseat of your grandma’s cadillac. There’s nothing fresher than what’s here I guarantee it. This is one of the finest examples of civil defense on the entire globe and that’s including Antarctica,…
Two Poems by torrin a. greathouse

& so i am writing another poem about gravestones which is to say, i am writing about destinations & not that we don’t all end up there, eventually, but i have watched far too many of us arrive to heaven, anxious & far too early as if it were a party, & we invited only…
Poetry: “Ass” by Diane DeCillis

Tremulous gibbous moons,sand dunes of the body’s terrain,I’m talking double bubble entendre—not smart ass, the know-it-all,the wiseacre—more cheek to cheek,a tango as it were, the stuff of rumba,samba, mambo—parallelyet unparalleled in synonymy. Call it: buttocks, butt, booty, behind, backside,bum, buns, bedonkadonk, arse, can, cheeks,hind-end, haunches, heinie, keister, glutes,rump, gluteus maximus (or minimus) tail feather,rear, junk-in-the-trunk,…