Category: The Last Word

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

New Poetry by Matthew Johnson: “My Front Yard in Summer”

The Moon felt like a tingly blur on my skin, And as it gradually slid down my shoulder through my forearm,I tried to smack at it like it was a marsh mosquito, Or an arcade game of whack-a-mole. We soft tossed Wiffle balls when the sun went down,And the whistle of the breeze passing through the hollow,…
Poetry by Sarah Fawn Montgomery: “Wading”

Father taught me craftwas the way to catch fish from a lureminnow shining. Hope was a fool’s lesson.Skill was flesh hung from a hook, casteasily into indifferent water. I pulled bodies breathlessfrom safety to shore, watched rainbows thrashat my muddied boots. Flaking flesh from brittlebone I feasted when full. Sometimes I tossed bodiesback into the…
Poetry by Alexandra Burack: “Any Second Chance of a Town”

We small-town dead crabgrass over the cracked bluewalls of the grange, where the post-mistress deliversdead letters beaming with flora of flourishing landsin the upper-right corner. Our young always meantto go there, those parks and strip malls outstretchedbeyond the frames our portraits wilt inside. If onlyvo-ag folk knew crops the way nanas knew suffering,that perfect loam…
Three Emotive Essays by Sandra Simonds

Scientists Recognize 27 Emotions and One of Them Is… Confusion No one knows the difference between prose and poetry and if someone says they do, send them to my living room. I sat in Mary Ruefle and Michael Burkard’s living room. Mary handed me a glass of green tea, told a strange history. Once, she…
Five Poems: Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi

This Doom I am still learning to die for myself.I can’t unremember a few. And I knowpeople who are enough gravity, whowill look you in the bullseye and say:this is how to stay, this is how to live.But here are their hands, tugging ontothe rainline from their eyes calling Godfrom the other end as if…
Two Poems by Jan Wiezorek

Uphill Uphill disorients us,our gnarly breathing,not knowing howher sentiment loadsher florid face, rotatingunder leaves succumbedto false serenity: Had to putmy dog down, she says—like standing on her head,blood rushing to her face,eyes roiling leaves—hillyfootfalls, pausing, no treescomfort her, no words, noquiet, upside lying down.I’m trying not to cry, to bestrong for her; her breathsclimbing (penumbral)…
Two Poems by John Gallaher

A Private Language In the parking lot this afternoon, a woman (mid-60s?) walked downthe row, got into a silver Ford sedan parked next to me,and sat there a bit like she’s really thinking, like she’s contemplatingexistence, working on her thousand-yard stare, as I was loadingmy groceries. Then she got back out, went down a couple…
Poetry: “God Responds [to the Proust Questionnaire]” by Jubi Arriola-Headley

The Proust Questionnaire has its origins in a parlor game popularized (though not devised) by Marcel Proust, the French essayist and novelist, who believed that, in answering these questions, an individual reveals [their] true nature. —Vanity Fair Where the typical journalistic interview tailors questions to the particular qualities of a subject, the Proust questionnaire’s unchanging…
Adam Day: Five Poems from Midnight’s Talking Lion and the Wedding Fire

Chile example 1973—Zurita arrested and held in ship’s cargo hold; process-experience under witnessing. He tried to disappear his eyes with acid, but failed. “Instead he created a document: chapter twentieth century having disfigured its face. Might not be quite right. Then, a photo of its bandaged cheek with the text below, EGO SUM, and: ‘My…