Most discussed stories

Not Lao-tzu's Magna Carta, xxxviii - xlv

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what is raised up must rest on its foundation.

My Love Affair With The Unknown Comic

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At least, I think it was him. It sure looked like him.

As Many Will Fall

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tumbling for you from afar as close-up. They will rewrite your dancing form like a proper magical spell on all their maddest days, using the branches of cherished trees dipped into the trapped wells of certain hosts of …

The Well

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It was by the well on one cold early spring morning

A Plea for Artists to Be Activists for Women’s Rights: Don’t Explain

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When I feel the sort of longing that sneaks up on me unawares, the sort held for the wrong kind of person that can make a woman clutch her heart in the night and sullies her blood with unwanted dreams in a thinking person's landscape, I hear, too, the deep…

Mon Oncle

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Mrs. L. was sitting on a love seat in her nightgown. She was sitting in a man’s lap....

Spring Miscellany

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Because we are exceptional,/ our 3000 dead in New York/ exceeds in impact that of 75,000/ burned at Nagasaki,

perfectly...fine...

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You left for the glittery wild of West Hollywood. I guess L.A.'s off-limits now. My heart goes fucking tachy when I drive over Kellogg Hill past Forest Lawn and see the skyline glowing through the rainbow haze of sunset. You're out there, out in the…

Roses

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Your laugh used to startle the nurses.

What She Left Unsaid

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Megan beat up on herself later over the unsaid.

Credenza

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Now the house is empty of romance except a potted flowering plant from my mother for Valentine's Day. No man has set foot in my museum since I moved here. One man has set foot. The owner's brother to see about the gasket under the toilet. The Comcast installers, twice. The…

We Get All Kinds Here

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A toothy grin greets me at my Public Storage counter. He visits every week. Peering through the wire first, he opens his cage door, gaze lingering. Finally he departs. Nothing ever placed or removed. Emptiness, that looming…

The Cusp of Leaving

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She waited on the hot, broken pavement, arm outstretched, her thumb a ticket to a distant, refracted horizon. Waves of heat danced like undulating snakes under the spell of a charmer. She pictured herself passing through them, abandoning the green of home for the…

Beautiful

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Adam, bronze and lithe, runs laps on the beach

Cost

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I rifled through the bedside table until I found dirty magazines

Lovers

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The lawyer is having a party the next weekend.... He's celebrating because he won a court case to have his alimony reduced.

Prosaic Miscellany

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Some days, you want all the red states to secede

Accepting New Patients

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You've had some truly awful shit pumped into your brains for years at a time now. The practice started a long time ago. It's not always your fault. The only lasting way to get it out of your head is to go and figure out exactly where…

Hag Masses

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Five poets were beheaded that day, their heads rolled off the scaffold to the dirt and faced skywards; the heads were smiling

Breaking Dawn

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This is where he died, she says to me, and points to the damp pavement. Her hair is wet, and slicked against her neck. The humidity is making everything engulf her. The sleep shorts I bought her last July are loose on her now, but between the rain and

On Not Having an Affair With a Flamboyant Minor Dadaist Poetess

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It’s just that—well, I don’t know how to put this— With a Dadaist poet a non-affair is the height of erotic bliss.

Being Old is No Place for Sissies

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My natural blonde hair is no longer sultry. Instead of a Dietrich look, I now assume a dead on impression of Bette Davis in "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane" some mornings.

Pieces

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I was a whole man once.

Still Strangers.

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I didn’t question any of it and instead sat motionless as she dropped my wrists and walked away seconds later.

The Ritz

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After oh so many hours the eyes could only close only to view a Ritz cracker marching on a nose

Marriage, California Style

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Out the window we could see the parking lot and, across the street, the Bijou Moonlight Laundromat.

Optimism

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She doesn't think about bad things anymore. She used to worry about nukes. She'd imagine Hiroshimas everywhere. She'd imagine the seas rising, the planet a string of deserts, polar bears drowning, butterflies shriveling. The world…

Tree Yaupon

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They clog the skimmer basket/ and fill the small Polaris bag.

Transformation

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The calculation was precise.

Rot

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