Category: The Last Word

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

Poetry: “Getting an IUD after Trump Becomes the President-elect” by Emily Paige Wilson

An empty vase has been placed near the sink.An elongated bottle cut from bright cobalt glass,slender neck stretched four or five inches high. It’s mydistraction when the clamp’s cold pinch starts to pulland turn my stomach. I did not wish for this intimacywith fear. My doctor’s fingers caressing a cervixthat won’t open, as if it…
Essay: “On Family and White Liberalism after the Election” by Justin Brouckaert

In the days after the election, Twitter became a madhouse of pointed fingers—who to blame, who to follow, what to study. Shocked and numb, I scrolled through every thread my liberal echo chamber deemed a “must read.” One in particular, by Marco Rogers, actually was. White liberals, Rogers claimed, have “systematically and deliberately separated themselves…
Fiction: “Correcting President Barnes” by Kelly Ann Jacobson

We called him The Editor. He arrived from the sky—black briefcase in hand, suit cinched tightly at the neck with a black tie—and after a flawless landing on the roof, entered the building in a few short, purposeful strides. He looked like a man, and if you touched his skin, he would feel like a…
Essay: “Recent Encounters with Wildlife” by Ginny MacDonald

I’m writing at work again. I’m sorry, employer. I keep the news feed on: Google the names, groups, affiliations. I get my facts straight. I saw a moose in the headlights—dust-brown flanks, head forward, long-legged and unconcerned with my existence. I stopped the car, but I was already past and the sun was not yet…
Poetry: “Night Snake” by Jennifer Martelli

I try to bend my backto the sadness. The moon grows backfat, a yellow scythe. Perseus decapitatesthe head of the Gorgon, snakes litter the cold sky, just asdangerous dead. My friend found one blacksnake head, one rat’s tail, juniper budswaxy & strewn in her yard after a quiet night.Anything I’ve ever feared regenerated, camearound on…
Poetry: “The Demagogue Diet” by Samantha Zighelboim

I ate my way through the debates, the conventions,that interminable election night. I ate through my classes in the days after, trying to console my students. While youappointed your cabinet of brutes, I was eating. I’ve eaten through the terrified phone calls, the sad texts. I atewhile my friends marched in the streets and I…
Poetry: “The Morning After the 2016 Presidential Election” by Lynn Marie Houston

So much dependson the two lesbiansacross the streetwho turn offthe morning news,leave still-steamingcoffee on the table,eggs uneaten on plates,and walk hand-in-handto the mud roomof their white colonialwhere they gatherthe American flag(so heavy nowit takes both of themto lift it),open the front doorlike they do every dayand place it in its holder. Lynn Marie Houston is…
Five Poems by Eleanor Levine

The Day After I’m crying for you America.For all the bullies who have picked on you.Knotted your hair in a twist.Soaked your face in leeches.Perpetuated myths about your reality.Sunk you in the apple barrel and pushed you deeper into it.Made you drown, but let you breathe, only to worry you might drown again.I am sorry…
Three Poems by Stevie Edwards

Five Days Before the Election & I don’t want to feel the earth today because a rich man is in itwho says he has the right to grab the most mine thing I can think of but maybe wouldn’t want tobecause maybe I am almost thirty & have grown stately in myself these last three years,watched ass…