Most discussed stories

Without Forgiveness

16821682 views55 comments44 favs

Click-clack, click-clack. The cadence of the tracks below push George back and forth between what happened and what is to come.

Fidelity

15021502 views55 comments44 favs

The night before leaving, we have French toast and red wine in Matthew's kitchen, our packs and sleeping bags and tents surrounding us, looming like golems. Because we're nervous, and a little drunk, the conversation inevitably turns to grammar. "I'm sure I learned…

Night Flowers

11841184 views55 comments33 favs

Night Flowers By Zofia Barisas The garden lies in deep darkness even in the noon of blazing day. A steamy pond lies still in wait for uncertain footsteps. Here aquatic green spiders, big as frogs, spin iridescent webs from leaf to leaf. Gigantic, ancient trees stand…

Silent Season

14531453 views55 comments22 favs

we are tired, you and I.

Another Way

12661266 views55 comments22 favs

If there was another way to describe emptiness, I'd word the endlessness of the sky, of the ocean at low tide.

The Nude Pianist: A Novel: Chapter 34

12541254 views55 comments22 favs

—Now that’s a hell-of-a-painting, Frank, he said. Those colors are engaged in warfare. How the hell did you do that?

The Dead in Paris, Parts 5 and 6

10841084 views55 comments55 favs

The virgins smirk / // We got medieval on their asses

Visitation

11211121 views55 comments44 favs

We sat up in bed. It's ‪two o'clock‬ in the morning. Blinding circular flashlight beams probe through the half pulled shades. Magnified black silhouettes of men's torsos lumber back and forth in the yard. We are in a fishbowl and being invaded.

Zombicil

20822082 views55 comments00 favs

I’m told it hurts. It hurts more than anyone ever thought it would. Every light in the room blinds you. Every sound in the room deafens you. The pain is excruciating as muscles and nerves that aren’t meant to work anymore are forced back to life i

Sarah

12521252 views55 comments00 favs

Rumpelstiltskin cried because you belong to me;

The Sky Just Now

12581258 views55 comments44 favs

has somehow gotten off its swaddled behind and put on its next new face, your own dipped in glass, of many green eyes for simple fair measure , lifting up my own morning lids with softly pulsating …

What We Talk About When We Talk About Photosynthesis

11011101 views55 comments22 favs

Minimalist/realist short-story writer Raymond Carver was fired from his job as an editor of science textbooks because of his inappropriate writing style.

A Walk on Ferry Beach, Maine

13141314 views55 comments33 favs

"and I turned to you, at some joke we shared, and saw winter ease its hand,"

The Day I Got Fired From My Foundation Job

863863 views55 comments11 fav

But of course, I didn’t get the grant, so my day job in communications at Katzenfeld continued. It was the first job I got out of college. I had been there for over a year and my salary was less than my rent and student loans combined, so I had to keep my

My Neighborhood is F*cked Up

10251025 views55 comments11 fav

There is a couple across the street who fight constantly. I feel bad watching them fight but they haven't had curtains since I moved into my new place and no one in this neighborhood can afford cable. I know that …

Heart of a Poet

10721072 views55 comments11 fav

He sneezed Hit the wrong buttonDidn't mean to kill him,but he didHeld onto me then, cryingand could not stopI feel so awful, he sobbedHe was asking for mercyAnd I meant to say, "yes,I will spare your life,"but I hit the kill buttoninsteadIt was an accidentHoney, it's just a…

As Poetry Month Ends, Prosaic Types Get Their Turn

12951295 views55 comments44 favs

“I’m going,” O’Bannon-Krim says with exasperation as she throws trinkets such as Dylan Thomas beer coozies and Edna St. Vincent Millay hair scrunchies into a cardboard box.

Denouement

10081008 views55 comments44 favs

No one has the right/ to script how someone dies.

"Don't look so sad"

492492 views55 comments33 favs

I don't want to see her again. No more pain. This one has barely healed. It hurt too much on that grey day when she said no to my longing eyes. "Don't look so sad," they used to tell me. I'm taking a different road now, I make a detour, I avoid her shop and her silhouette…

Silver Spring to Phoenix

13991399 views55 comments55 favs

Vibrations of a cavern a mile beneath silver willows.At two in the morning beyond the Sheratona lumination of pollution intercedes realism.Cardinals and doves develop their melodyprogressively caught in beat/heart echoes,as with spelunker canaries fluting noxious gasa small…

Drug Series # 19: Heroin

13501350 views55 comments22 favs

Billie Holiday and I want a cup of coffee and they tell us to go fuck ourselves.

14-B

19521952 views55 comments22 favs

It was a forgettable face, to be sure. Neither ugly nor beautiful, she looked like any one of a million American women. She could have been headed anywhere, but at that moment, she wanted to go to 14-B.

The Weirdo Melody Has a Meltdown of Its Own

12611261 views55 comments44 favs

They have their own homes to fill with bought and sold dreams. Their own babies to care for and feed. The world is big enough to have more layers than you can ever imagine. The lights will show you a way when you have turned too dark for your own…

prophecy of the playground

760760 views55 comments44 favs

they deafen you with cute / knive you with sugared songs / with machines turn love to silicon shit / hurl you at the god Fun / debrain you in their schools.

Notes to the Dead

964964 views55 comments44 favs

The kind of poem poets write and read. I mean, hey I was feelin’ it HARD at 3:24 am, and this is what spilled out.

God Works Out of A Home Office

907907 views55 comments55 favs

with binoculars neighbor reads screen text:

My Brief Career as Sloganeer for HAP

882882 views55 comments33 favs

I needed a job. They needed a writer without humanistic moral qualms to create slogans for the Human Annihilation Project

FULL NEST

10141014 views55 comments11 fav

Every time I look at you there are two dumb mouths that slip between stretch marks.

Freelance Your Way to Poverty

13601360 views55 comments33 favs

Buyers of freelance writing have a well-deserved reputation for responding slowly, thereby increasing your pleasure in much the same way that the Pointer Sisters longed for a slow hand.

Fusebrain

30343034 views55 comments44 favs

I am an icon of drunken ruin, sunken cheeks and shaggy face Breath like molded barley and eyes like old oysters placid and grey, devoid of illuminating thought