Most discussed stories

Imagining the Reading as Effacement

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What the spaces say// can be heard in the short/ and longer silences

Where is Now and When is There?

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The floor dissolves beneath us, pierced by lasered/ glare of countless eye-beams.

Peggy Guggenheim Visits her Favorite Question

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Q: “How many husbands have you had, Mrs. Guggenheim?” A: “D’you mean my own, or other people’s?”

The Artist's Conk

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Whenever talk dies, or darkness gathers too closely around the breakfast table, everyone knows the list of ritual activities we can brightly suggest to skip the day forward.

Mississippi

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“I won't live here,” Beth said, waving her hand to indicate the small Southern town in which they were having dinner—the most delicious fried chicken either of them had ever tasted—in a restaurant located in an antebellum mansion. She looked…

The Oddest Thing Ever Found in a Pocket

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On an October day in 1909 Mrs. Prudence O'Kannady, industrious wife of Mr. Joseph Patrick O'Kannady of Corn Falls, Nebraska, discovered, while sorting clothing for the wash, in the pocket of a set of dungarees belonging to her youngest son Rufus, a tiny human head. When…

Layers on a Cold Night

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Later that night, he lay his shivering children in his own bed, the bed that betrayed and abandoned him just a few years ago. It will protect them now.

The Sun is Here

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and I revel in the fact. There are other facts at work and play, but I'm hanging out with this one because it is my day off and I'm listening to music and writing poems. I like the bright appearance coming from the bedroom…

Hero Song

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paper cuts, an old film unraveled from its reel, risking exposure.

The Bum and His Shopping Cart, Giving Up His Ways

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A bum leaves his shopping cart in the middle of the intersection at 7th Ave and Perry St and walks away leaving everything behind

Reynee Deys and Reynee Nehyts and little dogs called Feydeaux.

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As I understand it, he crafted his art from sweat and blood; on parchment of living scrotum stretched over fretful porpentines; using a fresh dodo quill for each new preposition, and all that only on the first wet day after solstice in Yobhel. Something l

Snatch 7 (come 11)

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...the scream and the face...

Falling In Love Again

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Marv felt a stirring. Warmth in his gut. "Maybe we should get together," Marv said.

The Field Guide: Olivetti

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When you last produced writing on a manual typewriter, was it before or after your first sexual experience, or maybe during? Manual or otherwise. Which do you recall with more enthusiasm...

How to Make Love to a Woman

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There's just no pleasing her.

Reflections

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Today the color of the skyremakes my heart into somethingless willing to break, or to judge,and I am thankful for it. Acolor not unlike walking chestdeep in the ocean and seekingbeautiful clouds and thinking Iwill be back. Dreaming with the sky.Please stop lying to me. A…

Seattle November

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He ate husks of bone and old paper scraps with yesterday's headlines, blowing down the street like tumbleweeds now at four o'clock in the morning.He wrapped himself in an old army coat against the November winds as he tramped back and forth, back and forth, up the ten…

Smoke

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On his last day of high school Jackie York woke up to the smell of burning books. He didn't know it was his last day of high school. He did know the smoke coming through his rusty window screen was book smoke.

The Green Eyed Lady in the Glass Café

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Is this sought sea dream of the Arctic fox? The green below the circles of the white, above her eyes? On Formica tables where the woman smocks beneath glass borders of their vacant smiles, they pass by windows formulating styles,…

Privileged

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I could hide away in this tower But I am Rapunzel And I will let down my hair

The Art of Madness

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He had an addiction to elevating himself to higher levels of potential: some would call this ambition.

Your Move, Blattarian!

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Scavenge at that address only if you feel possessed of great courage, a profound faith in resurrection or reincarnation, or an impatient desire for a premature date with certain death.

Grunion Fishing

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As spilled on a sandy Corona del Mar beach/both in moonlight and starlight so lovely/and strangely sad as if receding still

Death of a Toothbrush (a random observation)

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Gone are the bristles bristling.Embedded with memoriesof crevices that oncefought to hold the spinach or walnuts within.No more feeling the undulatingresponses as the velvety tonguewinces and curls asthe wine is scrapped away.Is it wine, as we stare, oris it blood.Ah, the…

Moment of Creation

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Before he knew what happened, Shelia ran out of his life forever with their baby in her belly.

Breaking Eggs

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You want to read, you know where to click.

Scared Of Paradise

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It was if you memorized my ever detail but not the why. And perhaps that is what love is. Was that love? I lie in bed waiting for the man who came after you to join me. I hear his heavy footsteps and know he wants to go to Hawaii too, when our bud

The Meaning of Lines

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Hold your breathThe smoke here is thick, I knowIce underfoot, let it burn, let it go, but don't ask me to take your handYou have never been so patient as to sit and waiteven for the sun to riseWatch, now, here it comescresting over the hill as one large eyeboiling the…

Not Particles but Waves

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not in the interest of verisimilitude/ for there's plenty of that in each day already/ as trajectories interrupt other trajectories

Inversions of Pound: Canto I

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these tender girls tears recent / with stained souls, brides of dead, / cadaverous Erebus; unguarded ladder / long the down going…came Anticlea then