Most discussed stories

Ineluctable

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I attended the burial of our affair when I found the notebook-maybe it should be called her diary-she had foolishly forgotten, leaving it on the deck of my beach house where she stayed while I was on that short trip to Chicago and I was numbed at first, unsure how to…

Will #17

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I want crazy at my funeral. I want clowns, a petting zoo, fireworks, craps tables, male and female strippers, and a three-person band composed of old men wearing striped vests, black pants, and straw hats: one plays a banjo, another on tuba, and…

A Year and a Day Then

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Removing the deeply embedded jack-blade frommy naked side, like any slicked-upsplinter, was just a bit jarring on the first bite, on first try, I must admit. I freelydo so now to your frozen-over faces. You made your…

Grand

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The garden grew tomatoes.

Lipstick in the Kitchen

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In the middle of the floor squatted a sway-backed butcher block that appeared to have been chopped upon with such force as to make it cower.

An Excoriated Sensibility

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The machines of her perception/ tuned themselves to frequencies// that peeled her skin and fatty tissue

Two More Pennies Towards the Proper Procedure of the Pudding, If You Please

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I always thought I would feel your hand, always, Lay with you as we flew higher together, laugh with You in the little spaces left between certain trees, like tiny blue flowers that only appear suddenly, made secretly Of…

Wings

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The trouble began in October, when Ava, an embittered receptionist who worked at a small museum housed in a five-story Westside brownstone, discovered that the floors were littered with enormous grey feathers

Journey

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Do you know this song, Julia? I happened upon it one evening and only just before meeting you, a month before meeting, a month before arriving?

"Brava! Brava!"

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I woke to a crash and the sound of coins rolling along the linoleum. “Mom?” She did not look up. Her shaking hand was gathering up the single crown coins, the fifty heller pieces. Triumphantly she rescued a ten crown note from the piggy bank shards. …

This Will Hurt

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He says the medic held a needle/said, “This will hurt,”/and pierced his lung

Mating for Life

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Mari thinks that's all fine and fucking dandy.

Life's Meaning

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Every morning when she arrived at work, Jackie filled her bright red cup with coffee, sat down at her desk and riffled through Women's Wear Daily to see if there were any candid photos taken of her walking down Fifth Avenue where…

A Little Fishing

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Len and I sit on Harpo's porch, drink beer and gab. It's hot, even for July. Len and I joke and laugh, and Harpo stares off into the middle distance.

whoring

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I watched myself tilt my head and coyly smile in the bottom right corner of the chat window-the two off-kilter lamps in the room were casting an asymmetrical shadow over half my face.

Some Indian

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We had been drinking.

randy the ram

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For you I bring the circus, I reinvent the shine

Autumn Offering

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You may gather from me the spring of my youth

Audition

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My piano tutor, a walnut-faced shrew, rapped my knuckles with her small plastic baton to smack them back into the proper tempo, an adagio I’d mastered weeks before. One hour until the audition and damn if this woman didn’t break the skin of two of my fing

Workingman

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He died in the ditch he dug.

Saturday TV with Dad

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By the sixth - Dizz, Falstaff buzzed - Croons - The Wabash Cannonball

The Work of Beauty

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the steady, persistent work of beauty

Beard-Men

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Sometimes they bleat like sheep when I shave in the shower. They live in a complex social order.

Sleepless #3

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My ex-girlfriends live in a pastel-drenched cabin on the edge of a hemlock forest in Canada somewhere,

evening cigarette

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It's short.

The Judge's Wife Part 5

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—Jesus, that bastard has everyone in his pocket.

(2) 77 Words (pcs.)

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The sometimes shiver that arrives from awkward silences and the more often cold that comes from midwestern winters.

M Tractor

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If I saw a little old man out there, a fellow with a hunched up back, I shouldn't be afraid.

First Kiss With Rubber

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Julie studied her brush, plucking a strand of hair from it. She looked up and smiled. "My mother thought you were a peeper."

Mercury Unbound - 6

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Liszt, Piano Sonata in B minor. I don't like it but I can't stop listening. It doesn't fit my mood, or the high plains landscape, or the early evening, pink and blue, pastel colored sky.