CURRENT ISSUE (#46)
Spring / Summer 2010

• Current Issue
  • Fiction / Nonfiction
  • Poetry
  • Art
  • International
  • List of Contributors
• Archive
• About
• What's New?
• Links and Resources
• Submit
• Subscribe
• Visit The HFR Blog

Poetry Selection – Yusef Komunyakaa, Corners of Night

Their love for Mickey Mouse
& Sleeping Beauty, for blue
jeans & cosmic pinball
backdrops the glow
of Little Boy & Fat Man.
Madame Butterfly's kimono
branches into cherry trees,
as Japanese in America's Cup
T-shirts gaze into strip clubs
& Lebanese take-aways.
But no trick photography
can erase White Australia
till it's a subtitle for Kabuki
masks. Two young men from Osaka
fire flashbulbs at a blonde
posed beneath the Norgen-
Vaaz ice cream sign,
draped in a T-shirt mini.
She seems to know everything
about gods, how to reverse
Circe's curse. The men pay
five dollars a pose, as she
tucks each bill between her breasts,
saying, "I don't sleep
with the enemy." They smile
& bow. She slips a foot
in & out of a red shoe.
Silhouettes burn into stone
walls & earth. Three years
later, standing a block away
from the ice cream sign,
she goes back. Now,
with shadows washing out
as much of her face
night's mercy can undo,
they'll know how light
corrupts the body of an angel
who stands on a city corner
to make a street musician
play his sax three times harder.

^ Back to contributors

Fiction Selection – Rick Bass, from The Prisoners

Artie and Dave work together. They are going fishing with Dave's younger brother, Wilson, who has his own company, even though he is only twenty-eight. His job is to sell and install cellular car phones and electronic car locks and things of that nature.

The three men live in Houston. Wilson is single. Artie and Dave are not; they are in their late thirties. Artie is still in his first marriage, though perhaps not for long. Dave is into his second marriage, but it's going well. They both have children: Artie, two young sons, whom he is not that wild about, and Dave, two daughters--one with his ex-wife, and one with his new wife.

Dave is wild about both of his daughters, hates to be gone from either of them for more than a few hours, and each time he sees them it is like swimming to the surface from a great depth; and when he does not see them, he feels as if his lungs are about to burst.

Dave's first wife left him when they were living in Orange, New Jersey--had moved to Texas with her boyfriend and received custody of their daughter two years ago--and so Dave followed her down to Texas and got a new job there, and was able to see his daughter on Wednesday evenings as well as every other weekend.

^ Back to contributors

< Back to older archives