Category: The Last Word

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

“shattered,” a poem by Carina Solis

it’s like we’re flickering, burst lamplights smirking in the dark. faces gaunt, we lounge on a half-shaded stairway, the moon and its smile hanging over our emptiness, crooked as burnt cigarettes. we pant smoke into the horizon and watch haze cut into our skin: all we taste is desperation. in the play of our lives, the night is a blackened man with…
Fiction: “My Dinner with a Thief” by David Luntz

I was looking for something for my wife I couldn’t afford. That’s when I first saw her. A younger-looking version of my wife. A customer had left a diamond brooch on the glass top and she pocketed it like a Three-card Monte pro. Her gray eyes clocked mine and said: No one likes a snitch.…
Poetry: “Sky Burial” by Summer J. Hart

In my dream about water, I hover over a starless nothing, refusing to go in. Refusing to let tomorrow turn out like today. Sky broke. White plate. Picking porcelain out of the carpet. The phone rings. Rain churns the southwest corner of the basement into mud. In my dream about water, the waves swallow the…
“[UNTITLED LOVE SONG],” an acrostic poem by Jess Yuan

Favorite observer, how youUndulate between a blue loud emptiness and thisCeiling which shelters andKeeps the perimeter defined Throughout and beneathHeaping insight upon insight until it compactsEnriches, densifies, coagulates into Prediction for the built worldArtifact of its struggle, puddled.That’s my anxiety about establishingRelationships. I worry the Investment is seen byAll. I worry theRecording sounds like I know…
Short Fiction: “Adrift” by Max Wheeler

Like so much in Hassan’s long life, this transition was something done to him, not by him. My mom sounded resigned when she called me the night before my monthly visit. Her husband had been changing in small ways for a while already. “Look, honey. I have to tell you something.” I could tell she’d…
Two Poems by Julian Mithra

Marooned by Organs[1] hooee bighorn or prongbucki’m fat for backs hunched against arctic. Beacham’s offcollecting buffalo pies to hold back toothache pain, a furrow for hide-hunters to finger when we runout of bulletsand spit hormone circles, panting, free rangethrough rabbitbrush lungsand cliffrose kidneys gait, the kind of country broken by ditches and ravinesand canteringas hard as anything bloodsoak,…
“An Absence You Recognize”: A Prose Poem by Radha Kai Zan

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Radha Kai Zan creates stories across different mediums. As a visual artist, they indulge in the aberrant and sensual, centering often on the body and its mutable, mortal nature. As a writer, their fiction skews towards the speculative with a particular interest in exploring the macabre, erotic,…
Three Poems by Paul Chuks

Self-Portrait with Less Anxieties Lord, I want to be Hollywood-cool.That young boy whose father ownsA company—and wills it over toHim at twenty-one.Once—I needed bread—I went to theBlock industry to mold some.Two coins they paid me—finishedafter the economy swallowed itduring my lunch time. Thenext day—I took a knife to mythroat in mistaking myself amartyr for capitalism.…
Two Poems by Anthony Robinson

Failures of the Poets Wyatt couldn’t keep count of his “numbrous vers”And when I mentioned this, a user said, “pronounced properly,They scan perfectly.” They do not, but as a rule,I’ve stopped arguing with old men. The shaggy poems,Derived from an old Italian, have their mincing charms,And for this he did not deserve hanging, nor beheading.It’s unfortunate…