Most discussed stories

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…

Eggs

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still curious of the taste of eggs finally licking my plate

At Waffle House

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Staring at my $10 All Star Breakfast with extra bacon

Assiduity Nineteen

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Luv walks around touching everything with her little hands. Uzma follows behind her, talking sweetly, saying: "This is going to be your new home for a while, darling."

Puerility

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--So, why are you here?

architecture

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you look like the insides of my cheeks chewed.

The Shit List

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I have a tablet called, The Shit List...

Substitution

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Once there was a man who wrote in code. He was comfortable among substitutions

1980, What I Wanted

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Not to...Witness such sufferingWatch as a life fades awayReceive the callAttend this funeralBe surrounded by well meaning family and friendsStand by helplessly as my father sobs in his brother's armsNotice the pain settle in my brother's eyesSee my grandparents' tortured,…

Not Yeatsian

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Didn't he have like a frog No lips so speak of, and the weathered lizard Look of the frequently face-lifted?

Letters to Conrad

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Dear Conrad, If you cannot control your dog’s barking I’ll rig up a loud speaker facing the general direction of your house, and every time your mutt starts howling at the moon, I’ll start playing “It’s a Small World (After All)” at top volume on the p

Godot Finally Shows!

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Vladimir and Estragon stood hunched at the corner of Ellis and Taylor in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. Bedraggled and spent, they looked dully around them at pretty much nothing. They could have been thirty, or maybe…

In the Sequence of Events

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Eroica sprawled among/ the horns and violins

Older Now

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You will never know how much it hurts When someone else touches your face. But I also know how much you count on others To pull the slivers out of your heart.

Fast Or Slow

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Some people burn slowWhile others burn fastAnd betweenAll kind of things happen:There's happiness sadnessJoy and angerSicknessThings happenAnd when you are in theWorldThe worlds molds youWith all it elixirs and tempationsThe good timesThen come the wounds and scarsAnd the…

Distractus Refractus Ontologicus: The Dissemination of Michael Martone

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1 Michael Martone is Michael Martone. 1.1 Michael Martone begins, middles, and ends Michael Martone.

Ishpeming

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Ishpeming straddles Lake Superior to Marathon, reaches into the water, pulls out a clump of frozen hotdogs, breaks them apart one by one, rolls them between its fingers, heats them on the thigh of its corduroy pants, and throws them into the sky. Comets t