Most discussed stories

My Dad Builds the House

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Before the saw came my fist through the wall. Now I kneel on the crumbled drywall in my son's closet holding a flashlight, peering into the hole at the plumbing parts I'm supposed to replace. On the other side of the wall the bathtub faucet drips. It is my second…

Refugees

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Four in the morning. I was awake because I'm always awake. There were little fog-halos around the streetlights.

I Have a Hard Time Having a Good Time

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At the third or fourth discotheque I drink so much I accidentally find myself happy.

In Portland, Where It Rains

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So many opportunities for mud can be found in these hills,

Sugar Cookie Season

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take out the yellowed recipes/ left by mothers and grandmothers—// perhaps the great aunt who never married—

Journal of Puritan Minister, Jon Sorrim: Fragment 1

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It was the first time I had ever seen a possession.

When Borders was Alive and Well

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I'd been working for two years as a barista in a Starbuck's in a giant, two-story Borders in an upscale mall on Rt. 355, a main artery between Washington D.C., and Frederick, Maryland. I'd finished my M.F.A in 2000 and was trying to build up steam for more grad…

Other Rooms and Other Houses

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Your self-effacement hid/ so much of you// until you died and the full/ inked legacy shown in light

Bare Feet

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Bare feet on hardwood floor Twists into circles

The Seer

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The strange bones of language wander the room.

Light Eyes

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Once, when he had been married for a year, she sent him a card which said, "If you have seen a cat smoke a pipe, you have got it made." There was an illustration of a big, black panther, standing up on its hind legs, smoking what looked like a big tub of

Down on the Street

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dirty-pretty

77 Words About Nothing [5-24-2012]

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Alright is alright but alright is a state of mind, right?

The Bombs & Blood of Texas & Boston

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Running into the fire, the smoke and the chaos; selfless first responders, innocent bystanders, and dedicated runners

whip

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under a laughing moon

Meticulous

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Have you measured the cups, the conveyors' yield? Do you know the span? I am the LORD your God, she murmured.

Laundromat

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Who am I?

Something Short

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It went like this: We were at the river. It had been a long day. The sun set over the hill tops, now. Me and Danny sat by the edge with buckets of water full of small fish and some dead crab that we'd got from the market, earlier and looked out over the small waves the…

To See Who's There

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Able to search through centuries, I click, scribble, skim,resurrect wet stone walls, the smell of burning peat.Bob's your uncle; Peggy's your aunt.Name your family, child. My brother said helloto Uncle Shirley and Aunt Greg. I was more…

The Gowanus. Expressway, not canal

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in their hunt for desires not felt on either side of the crescent / called Gowanus

Blowing Up While Fading Out

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It calmed the guilt in my heart while kids reveled, laughed, and "made time" with the neighborhood girls on that final night of freedom. No one would talk to those girls again.

Capital Offense

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They can’t exterminate the poor just yet

Sunbelt Winter Sketches

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Sunlight and the small wind/ swallow the frost/ on rooftops and windshields

Sliver

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It was beautiful and bright and it felt so real.

You Can't Even Clink

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your matching glasses up to mine in the fake air anymore, or click your widening fingernails against the hard bed railings in protest of anything you might be feeling in the floating silt-like depths of your jagged nerves, but…

Bukowski and the Greyhound Bus

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It’s a grey and stormy day naturally We’re crowded into a tiny bus shelter as it pours 57 varieties of cats and hounds They keep hitting the pavement around us with the splatting sounds those animals make when falling out of the heavens

The Committee

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We are prisoners of anticipation.

The Space Between Words (Valentines Day)

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Looking for meaning in spaces between words.

Halfhearted Objections

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The old man behind the counter recognizes fear and anxiety in the boy's face, and sees the brown paper bag clenched in his other white-knuckled hand.

1740: My 7th Great-grandfather

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a half-moon hung straight up and down