Tag: HFR Archives

“The Inner Eye Tattooed,” a poem by Marc Vincenz

(1) Looking in like a snail, my nose crawls against glass. How the view alters up close and the breath a mountainous fog against matter’s impermeable will. Isn’t this the color of pure silence— that rainbowed tint when night swallows reflections? (2) In the nothingness of the primordial, words written before words are known and…
“Christopher Ke’alohapauole Akana: A Life,” fiction by Jonathan Callahan

When I first set out to write the Life, I was twenty-six years old, my subject at the time therefore just approaching the twenty-seventh anniversary of his expulsion from the womb. Yet nearly four fruitless years had passed by the time I intend to revisit in these notes; I was now twenty-nine, and had arrived…
“Three Photos: Urbanity” by Peter Witte

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Makeshift Memorial Rain Riding Two Men and a Mattress Peter Witte is a writer and visual artist. His work has been featured in a variety of literary magazines and journals including The Sun, The Threepenny Review, Tin House Online, Hobart Online, and The Rumpus. He teaches writing at the University of Maryland.…
Six Essays from Self-Erasing Portrait by Joe Hall

Smoker’s Lounge Take the inscrutable diners and staff behind the plate glass of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks.” Take the plate glass and bury it deep in the street-like incandescent night of a factory. Replace the counters with folding tables. Make everyone older. Give each one a newspaper and a cigarette to pull on then smudge the…
Three Poems by Ace Boggess

Schoolteacher Elegy scanning the obituaries this morning I seemy junior high English teacher the one who ignored me while I slept or pretended to sleepwith head posed on arm pressed to the desk then introduced me to Hugo the French Shakespearewith Quasimodo’s bones cradling a rose in Esmeralda’s grave I was a child in hiding…
Three Poems by Jeff Tigchelaar

There’s This Thing and I don’t know what it isbut I haul it all aroundbecause it’s attached to my hand. There’s this cloth that’s wrapped tightaround my arm: bright orange cloth all the waypast my elbow and affixedto some mesh wiring.A lot of mesh wiring.I have to drag it behind me. It’s like I’ve gota…
Essay Hybrid: “Introduction” by JoAnna Novak

IBegin with a lie. Life-stuck or stasis, miles orminds: unleash the lies.Bark them off. Begin un-urgent, unringed, grub-nailed and urgey, youngenough to be buyable,looking on labels. IIOnce I wended. A toA; after that—a curvet,a barreling. Set fromthe capital and droveborders over-fast,over-hard, o’er thevalley; his old car wasrazed, a bothered stateof dust. Mountainsabutted my path andrunaway…
Three Collage Hybrids by Guy Benjamin Brookshire

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Liberty Liberty looks in the mirror and over her shoulder far on the floor there is a bloody massacre. A hideous and murderous entertainment. In which the very best of people find themselves compelled at least every once in a while to complete their application and legally…
“We Sink Like Ships,” a story by Chelsea Laine Wells

This is what I learned: in the seconds after death, do nothing. Hold still and let it beat past into permanence because in the seconds after death everything is flayed open to the softest nerve-strung tissue and any move you make, any word you say, anything you touch will live forever on the end of…