Most discussed stories

Grace

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The instant you remember gratitude with enough focus to spring free its power...

1935 What I Wanted

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embarrassment

Black Hole

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The falling may continue// forever.

Los Angeles IKEA Existential Meltdown

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Sometimes, you compare your living situation to a prison because it makes you feel better. "At least I have a fridge," you think to yourself.

The Bird, The Snake, and Me

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The truth about the bird and the snake is this. They are dead. And me? I cannot stop thinking about them.

Wet Work

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blinking out

Story

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For two days, I bashed out words with grimacing fingers, wrenching images from my whining consciousness – a weak, lumbering, uninspired piece – and now for what?

The Parade

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I see them walking. They pass right by my house. If I’m outside, I sit down on our porch and watch the parade. Sometimes I watch them out of a front window.

The Black Hole

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Matilda went wild at sixty-five. Legs left unshaven for the first time in fifty years, hair still and proud, knotted with forgetting. She’d roam the streets at night, a traveler without design. Matilda was a gardener of sorts, digging up all previous assu

Lovelies on the Last Shore

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All of those lovelies, pitched on the ground, ignored and ready to rot.

Amber

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I am the marigold wheel no one can understand, the menace your grandfather warned you about. Yes, yes, that last phrase was overkill...

Resistance

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I can no longer conjure the sweetness of a plum

There Were Giants In Those Days, and the Wickedness of Men

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We laugh at them, parading two-by-two, the elephants rolling tail to trunk across the makeshift gangplank, wide slats flexing under their sway. A pair of snakes contemplates gulping a pair of frogs and their clandestine movements stun a cricket and his mate. Birds squat…

Hoop Dreams, Harvard Style

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“You have no idea what your lives will be like if you can get out of the ‘hood. You could be driving Volvos, eating Tuscan cuisine, getting MacArthur ‘genius’ grants!”

Monday Lunch

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Earlier that morning a tree in the yard had filled with starlings, and on the way home after lunch, the sky held planes that looked like starlings, floating together.

What We Give

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Oh, what jealousy does to us! What love does to the living!

Last Night

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If they are all speaking medicine & I / start speaking French - how / rude am I? Would they understand then / what it is to be entirely left out / of the conversation, unseen?

Kegel Exercise

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1.It was unfair to my time and my small kitchen rug that it took me two days to finish reading Meg Pokrass' “The Big Dipper,” pp. 10-12

All the Young Angel Heads

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I don't think you understand. A sad boy doesn't just die inside, slowly he becomes withdrawn from certain types of lovely youthful reasoning out loud, accustomed to feeling what is expected of him, just to be allowed to survive another…

Paul Gauguin: Annah la Javanaise

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It's the outrage of the red monkey at her feet, And the nude thirteen-year-old woman sitting upright In the blue velvet chair, and the hints of blue at her navel, And at her lips and belly and crotch, that so upset Paris. Gauguin had his nerve

Fire Alarm

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You snore and the house is safe again.

Your Guide to Wi-Fi Security

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Public Wi-Fi ”hotspots” allow men and women to ogle each other discreetly while pretending to write the Great American Novel.

Regret

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Regret takes the shape of little clouds ...

Night Letters from the Underground

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As ghosts, they became lovers. Rodion would strum the Underwood keys like a balalaika. Lizaveta would sing.

Trees and Strangers

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The summer I was eleven years old....

Irish Drunk

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Your honour stinks of failed fishing trips to Galway.

On Tuesday

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When they talk, they put their hands like a cup around their mouth

Bring on the Drones!

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Never mind that they cost millions per year just to amuse the monkey bone in us all or that they spew pollution or that their only real purpose is murder. They are justified by skill and thrill.

Truth at a Bonsai Booth

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I envisioned bound feet of ancient Asian women who wore embroidered slippers that hid grotesque disfigurements.

My Heroes Now Are Robots

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I understand why Warhol said/ “I want to be a machine.”/ Forget this sorry clay.