Most discussed stories

The Family of Unsharpened Pencils

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and pressed an area on my forehead between my eyes

Tabula Rasa

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accidental ground/ for index-fingered figures

At the Jennifer Aniston Intensive Haircare Clinic

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Hunger only makes people hungry, but bad hair can ruin your whole day.

Literary Intercourse

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Meaning is harder to sell, unless it’s an analysis of why there is a Justin Bieber.”

Klarheit oder Genug

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F.B.I. then or: "I said later 'for a boob job' and imagined her, a public lawyer, wandering Arizona on foot unable to hide a Playboy-Mansion style rack."

Winsome Mshindi

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The cold and the ice’ve really stoked a fire in those old bones of his. He runs with the gait of a racer, front legs straight out—each extension producing a crack like Jack London spitting into the cold...

Confession

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As a boy Edward had stayed in the confessional several times in a row. The priest was drunk and couldn't tell it was the same kid over and over. The tiny door slid open…”Scobbity bobbity…tell me your sins…” Edward confessed what he thought were sins, then said…

Barking at the Moon's Silhouette

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We took our turn at the younger stage. One good turn deserves another and all that crap. But does it always have to strong-arm the world's latest lovers apart with so much pushed and shoved ultra violence?So far…

Freddy in the Future

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“Me try anything,” he says, then laughs a little. “You’re fucked.”

The Dream Shop

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From nine at night until five in the morningthe mannequins staff the Dream Shop.Customers sleepwalk in and murmur their enquiries.Some of the patrons are very demanding.They queue outside before opening…

Life Sized

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The first time I saw Little Man was on a bright, hot afternoon near the end of November, when the trains had just pulled into the fair grounds and the familiar smell of upturned turf and sun-basked animals returned to Sarasota.

One Man Caught in a Multitude of Self

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The idea that anything is possible only in the moment that it isn't

A Terse Invocation of Cuttlefish

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Once the limits of human commitment to logic are conceded, cuttlefish may in fact be deemed superior logicians to all other aspirants.

The World is Full

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of birds. The world is full of snakes. The world isfull of mushrooms. The world is full of flies. The worldis full of bombs. Not so many trees. Not as many as you might think. The world is full of flowers. Notso many bees. The world is full of rocks. Some…

trenton

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his word

Book of Genesis

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Almost to the elevation of regret.

We Must Love One Another or Die: A Brief History

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Novelist E.M. Forster said of Auden "Because he once wrote 'We must love one another or die' he can command me to follow him."

The Watcher

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...

The Birth Canal Was Easy

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It was time.

The City's Not For You

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You left your quiet life for a home in the city.

Surge Of Green

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Already past the harbinger of yellow crocus

Neighbors

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She sees the little girls in the yard through her front window. They’re as naked as the day they were born, not far from the event itself. They dip backward and forward like pitchers, laughing, balling up their little white fists and shaking them like t

"Your face seems faint against the violet glades..."

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Your face seems faint against the violet glades; The long winds echo once, then fail to start. Some wounding scent has stripped my hopes apart That dwelled to scent you. From the cavalcades The leaves make, bare at times since eve's sting fades To…

Pull Another String

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Now as my fearful hand goes unwittingly up I search the faraway trees for the closest possible answer I know I don't know. The clever waiting beast is looking my way with an intelligent roving eye that says he likes to hit. It doesn't matter. You're worse…

Nativity in Tahiti: Paul Gauguin

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The young girl has given up, and lies sprawled out upon the yellow cover on the bed, with her blue sarong wrapped loosely around her body. One arm lay back up above her head, where it was thrown during the exertion of birth. Her yellow halo surr

Tiger Lily

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4th of July weekend, Woodland canyon, summer heat like the Garden of Eden, lush, green, secluded. She lay by the creek in a lounge chair under dappled shade from the sycamore trees, listening to the frogs jump and the birds sing, admiring the orange tiger lilies that…

Blind

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My mother saw the Devil everywhere, even in my dance teacher, with his black leotards and chest hair like bean sprouts. "You're flamingos," he'd say in class when we balanced on one foot; when we lept into the air, "Now you're panthers!" I pictured him in a dark robe,…

Carrion Flower

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Jacabo gave the boy a can of beer with oxycontin and rat poison in it. He instructed the boy to drink and talk. Jacabo did this, fully aware that making ghosts was a costly enterprise.

The Meeting

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When he leans back from the telescope through which he had been looking, he sports a derby and a Hercule Poirot moustache.

Too Weak for the World

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There was a certain romanticism in it, the salty old man sidling up to me at a bar, rhapsodizing in a slurred stream of conscious about the state of the world, the country, the state of his own heart. He didn't have an eye patch nor beard, nor was he…