Tag: HFR Archives

Three Short Essays by Karen Craigo

Fat Race Marshal I’m just here for the donuts. That may be the fattest thing I’ve ever uttered, but it’s okay. You have to own your body when you’re at the 6:30 a.m. registration for a 15K race, and all around you, very fit people are engaged in walking lunges or the dynamic pigeon pose.…
Justin Hamm: Three Prose Poems

Children in the Middle Ages Earlier that night, a middle-aged man dressed himself in a cape and green tights and shimmied up a tree to rescue his neighbor’s new kitten. We sat numbly over our steaming hamburger pie, watching first the climbing oil prices and then the live feed as our would-be hero lay in…
Zachary Doss: Three Boyfriend Fictions

The Natural Man Your boyfriend decides to grow his hair out. He has always kept himself carefully groomed, but lately he had been going to greater and greater lengths to manage hair growth. He waxes, he trims, he clippers, he tweezes. He keeps every follicle under such careful control that when he says he’s going…
David Need: Four Poems from Goodnight Irene

March 12th 2011 Perhaps a ruined world & death offshore is we have to do, not related to a story that we cared, o, extinct birds & the red McD’s fried chicken box next to could be yellow dock or mallow leaves by a fence; outside this Atlantic is a city, slumped & death’s a…
Two Poems by MJ Santiago

daymares imagine if the sex were real imagine I am touching someone and they are casually mentioning their trip to Ireland with their parents, how they slept in a castle and it was beautiful and they want to go again next year and none of it makes me want to die imagine they are removing…
Chris Holdaway: Excerpt from CODE: Equinox, a poetry hybrid

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Chris Holdaway is a poet/editor/linguist from New Zealand, where he directs Compound Press (compoundpress.org). He is the author of HIGH-TENSION/FASHION (Greying Ghost, 2017), with recent work in Cream City Review, The Seattle Review, and elsewhere.
Nathan Wade Carter: Two Poems

Impossibly Large Horn I am parrots together.We telepath to concrete veins.We cross the black when told.We don’t like to practice.But that’s what water do. Weather spits and pisses on the grooves of canyons. What noise would this make, A right-size needle and an impossibly large horn? Coin toss into well. There’s a man down there…
Sara Lautman Illustration: “overcast”

*Ed.’s Note: click image to view larger size. Sara Lautman is a cartoonist, illustrator and editor in Brooklyn. Her drawings have been published with Tablet, Jezebel, The Pitchfork Review, The Believer Logger, and are forthcoming in The New Yorker. Her next collection, The Ultimate Laugh, was published by Tinto Press in winter 2016. She is…
Poetry by merrit k: “What I Meant When I Handed You the Key”

i’m tired of giving.i want you to takeeverything about meand crumple it into atidy heap besidethe hissing radiator. later we cando the work of unfoldingtogether, smoothing outnew lines with sure hands. for now, inward pressure,compression, andthe tense promiseof a spring. merritt k is a Canadian writer whose work investigates the conditions of intimacy in precarious…