Tag: HFR 2.1

Fiction: Harmony Neal’s “This Is What It’s Like to Die”

Jasmine My father beat me for giving the dog some bread. The dog had looked so hungry and scared. Its fur was missing in patches and it only had one eye. The other socket was covered in pus and red bumps. I wasn’t scared of the dog. I wanted to help. I could remember a…
Two Poems by Natalie Shapero

Half-staff Long enough I have lived in this city—when the flagsits at half-staff, strangers ask me why, and askin vain. I only know the major deaths. I’m best with warsof expansion. On losses beyond that, I have littleto add, except to make clear I trust and do not envythe low clerk charged with every up…
Three Poems from Nymphlight: Erin Lyndal Martin

I Want to be Drunk with You So I Can See You Laugh:Les Amants du Pont-Neuf You, my lover, the fire-eater, lay with me atopthe oldest bridge that crosses the Seine, the wine making us hoot and yell.Booms of light flared and blasted, so we stood atop the bridge lookingat Paris—our Paris—and waiting for debris.…
Three Fictions by Megan Martin

Way Beyond Good and Evil I should be admiring and appreciating the Cloroxed whiteness of the shower curtain you Cloroxed yesterday. It certainly is a miracle: the whitest, most disinfected shower curtain upon this rotten earth. In Cloroxing, you have protected me from unimagined dangers like shower-bound disease. Instead, another man—an exciting one—is here in…
Essay: Excerpt from Tiny Gradations of Loss by Nicholas Grider

Tumors that couldn’t have grown fast enough to suffocate her. She died from cancer, she died from causes unknown. With him but already gone, crimson scarlet alone. Still warm. _______________ Day -2 he thinks it must just be all the morphine. He wants to think so. He says it to himself. He says it to…
Poetry: Joshua Ware’s “The Divine Mystery of Clothes”

cut from fabric in a secondhand store, unravels our emptinessinto closets of cotton, linen, nylon, and silkIn the dream of fashion etiquette not yet discoveredwe speak in hushed tones of a blue taffeta gown you will wearfor the second-coming: a rapture rendingthe naked from the nude, a divide never healedfrom now until nightdress. I cannot…
Fiction: Dan Crawley’s “Bonkers”

Becky and Coach stand shoulder to shoulder at the sliding glass door and watch what is going on outside. Earlier, snowflakes the size of teeming confetti poured out of the sky and covered the ground with a few inches. But now with the sun fully out, the white stuff sticking to the small backyard patio…
Fiction: Tom McCartan’s “Tennessee Williams Is a Hack”

I used to think I invented this one word. One day I looked it up and it turned out that Mark Twain had used it in some damn book. I keep trying to come up with these stories and everyone always says that they already are something, like a movie or a sitcom episode. “You…
Fiction: Andrea Kneeland’s “Side Effects”

Scene 73: Check-in When no one is looking, I pry nails from the wall with my bare hands and I tuck these in my pockets. When they ask if I have any sharp objects with me, I hand them the nails. I got them here I say. They were in your wall I say, which…