Most discussed stories

Me and Frisco on the Road

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I don't think I minded so much watching the trucks hit him, one breaking his spine with a decisive snap, and the other finishing the job by splitting his skull. I don't think I minded watching as much as I did watching those two boys poking around at his

This Poem Has No Title

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...Or perhaps it has; It depends which way you look at it. Perhaps the reader may cite laziness As my reason for not titling this Any other than I would have done As now, with such a title As it has, since for some reason I never…

diversion

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Nothing At All

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The ice in my drink provides ample cooling. The brew strength of my tea is just such that it combines in a pleasing fashion with the melting ice. My mind is clear and my belly absent hunger. I am completely sated from any physical desire at this very mome

the hunt

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Emma Louise

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Emma Louise is walking over a concrete bridge when she spies, out of the corner of her eye, a man fishing, waist deep, in the river tumbling below. She is thinking that the water must be very cold on this autumn day, when she sees an extraordinary thing.

The 24-hour Date

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We watched kids tweeze snapping turtles out of the park grass. They dropped them into a styrophoam cup and called it the snap turtle home. When they grow up they will bite your arms off, their father said laughing.

Adam, Eve and the Indie Author

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In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God. What on Earth does that mean? What the hell? Earth, hell, heaven, they were good concepts. He took a rib out of Adam and began to write with it.

Bread

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I am standing in the kitchen, kneading dough, because this is one way to say sorry. This is way to say, things will be different now, look.

Table Thoughts

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“You should've let him drown,” she once told me. Doesn't she see that I did? I'll let her drown, too.

Unfinished Business

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The receipts all fell into the black leather valise he’d retrieved from storage that afternoon, except for the forty-eight cents, which wound up in the right front pocket of his jeans.

The Best Interest of the Child

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He was here and then he was gone. He wasn't at my ex-wife's house either. On Tuesday we were at the circus and that's the last I saw him. I jumped into my '68 Beetle, one step above a clown car, and I stopped by The Big Top. The carnies were there, smoking cigarettes and…

A Christmas Tale

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leaning over the banister, her Christmas waist making the wood swoon and creak, a warning sign if there ever was one...

Monsieur, Monsieur, Nous Avon Pamplemousse!

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He came running out of his narrow little shop, Berthillon and chased me down the Ilse St. Louis street, saying, “Monsieur, Monsieur, nous avon pamplemousse! It’s ici, Monsieur. Your pamplemousse. They just come in this matin, morning and I’

Left at the Tracks

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Shivering in the car, he watched his parents arguing under the porch light. He saw the smoking anger of their breath as they jabbed the cold air with accusatory fingers.

Saturday Matinee, Circa 1961

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We are impressed and cheer them on/ in their struggle against the wild/ and unkempt ravages of nature

The Kept Man

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If the Titanic rises from the bottom of the sea, I will meet you on deck, in a deck chair. Fully dressed for a change.

Living Through Fuzzy

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They politely urged him not to get too involved with his creations.

ER Chronicles (1)

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Thank christ for feminst theory and fat good natured shrinks and tall men who stand guard over me with real guns, real bullets.

Examination of Faith (And the Big Bang)

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The marble, it's just there. I can't explain how it got there (or when), all I know is that everything is in that marble. By "everything," I mean every thing. Your breakfast? It's there.

The Planetary Phosphorescent Horses

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sprang straight up to their full galloping heights roaming over your hills like constantly shifting eyes, your strange approximated illuminating hair like ghosts giving birth to a tender smell of green sea foam. This was all I saw, but it was quite…

Same Trailer, Different Park

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Suddenly everything is delaminating People are popping right off the surface of humanity I am coming loose from my previous lives

Tyka

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I open the door...

Guardians

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His toenails were so long they curled under and into the black leathery pads of his feet. They lightly clacked on our linoleum, tap shoes made of thick petrified roots. He didn't seem to mind.

Signs

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The monkey did not live for long. He’d lost interest in the stuffed dog pretty much right away. The farther away the shuttle, the more garbled and fanciful the sign language the monkey had been taught became.

This is Mardi Gras

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We fly in first-class on Piggy Bank's dime, arriving at eight o'clock on Friday morning. The limousine driver with chestnut skin holds up a sign with our names on it. We drink single malt scotch from crystal glasses as New Orleans jaunts past…

Assiduity Twenty

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I experience a presence when walking through the forest . . .

The Fereigner

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So, I escaped from the Iron Curtain out of Czechoslovakia, as was called then. That was in 1956 I escaped, and came to Chicago where all of you were for some time already. I know our grandparents came over in early part of century, but my part of family

Neat

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His audio archive of Bay Area musicians extends along two walls, twenty-five by fifteen feet, in drawers of C.D.s hundreds deep. Where will it go, I asked, permanently.

The Night

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her parents were gone they sat on the love seat side by side saying nothing the longest time