Tag: HFR Archives

Colleen Kolba Comic: “Up Late”

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Colleen Kolba is a writer and cartoonist from Chicago, Illinois. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Rumpus, Hobart, Entropy, and elsewhere. She is an editor at weirderary and teaches writing and literature at the University of South Florida, where she is completing her…
Natalie Cunningham: “Earth Works,” an essay

The people of the Midwest were inveterate movers of the earth. Monks Mound towers above its landscape, with hundreds of smaller mounds tossed across the landscape like a child playing jacks on the table of the soil. They used seashells, stone hoes, baskets, a painstaking process of digging, loading, hauling, dumping, shaping. Someone estimates forty-three…
A Short Story from James Brubaker’s Black Magic Death Sphere: (Science) Fictions: “H.G. Wells and The Present Crisis in Human Affairs”

Sometime in 1935: Imagine Herbert George Wells sitting on a stack of wood in a soundstage at Worton Hall in Isleworth. He watches an army of carpenters build a façade of the future out of cheap wood while he awaits the arrival of his film’s set designer, Vincent Korda. The carpenters swarm around Wells, every…
“Election Year,” a poetry comic by Catherine Bresner (published in the empty season)

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Catherine Bresner’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Offing, Passages North, The Pinch, H_NGM_N, Cream City Review, Burntdistrict, Handsome, and elsewhere. She has been the coordinating editor for The Seattle Review, an intern at Wave Books, and is currently the managing editor for BOAAT Press.…
Sean Lovelace: Two Fictions

Destiny James Franco mail ordered a monk. The monk was the son of a flea trainer, who was the son of a flea trainer, who was again the son of a man who professionally trained fleas. “The blood of the flea is within our soul,” the monk told James Franco over Pop-Tarts (this was in…
Poetry by Kamden Hilliard: “Goat Theory”

is gruff and tumble. started from the bottom andit’s here. present. accounted for. the Greatestof All Time don’t do their own accounting. they don’tadd up. Icarus flew too close to the sun. Icarusis not a GOAT ‘cause GOATs hear too closeand wonder what the fuck yall’s talkin’ ‘bout.i mean, who hasn’t fantasized abt James Deanand…
Nonfiction: A.A. Balaskovits’ “How I Helped You Fly with Pearls in Your Guts”

You must never doubt the thoughtful cruelty of your childhood. My mother raised butterflies of two sorts: the Monarch with ombré orange wings, and in less quantities, because they take so long to pupate and hatch, black Swallowtails, with blue edges or white spots. I assisted her at a young age, even when my hands…
Anne Champion Poetry: “Anne Sexton Prepares for the End”

After the shoulder heave of a garage door, my body weighs heavy in my shoes,a little slack, a little sagging— it’s no secret time is erasing me, and only vodka can wet my throat.I inhale its pungent punch, the scent familiar in its knock-out discomfort, just as my body is onlyfamiliar when the knots squeeze…
Emily O’Neill: “Preparing My Own Death,” a poem

there’s an obvious difference between Hawthorne & julep strainers, an obvious reason why some people can’t eat pineapple. an obvious recipe for property. for help. for solitude. I can’t stop me from horsehide / can’t suntan the virgin out. I’m shy & nobody believes me. the memorized proof: what’s loud can’t call itself afraid /…