Most discussed stories

Picking the Bark Off Experience

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After breakfast, he dresses and heads / for the blackjack tables.

The Cake for God

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is all but invisible. Some say this is because it is within a bakery window, a bakery within a bakery window,and thus appears to be everywhere at once.The cake for God has never been eaten, except by children who seem to later forget what it tasted…

The Third Time my Father Tried to Kill Me

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They sang and clapped and stomped shod feet on hardwood floor, the smell of man sweat and bomb-making thick as perfume.

Mariposa

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He would not take Prozac and talked Jesus to her as if from a bucket.

The tuner

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yielding wood song

Help Me Rhonda

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Walking to class, Paula routinely fishes around in her purse to be sure the condom she thinks of as a close friend, even naming it Rhonda, is in there to help her avoid a pregnancy yet, even so, Paula admits that sometimes she daydreams in that boring economics class,…

We Must Be Carefully Taut

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In the dread / of night, navigate by the sliver moon

How Poets Die

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Mark Strandover decadesa steady diet of dictionenlarged his heartone day it just burstRobert Frosta crazy ideathat he couldbuild a wallwithout mortar tookpossession of his mindhe piled stoneon stone higherand higher untilthey toppled overcrushing him beneath Wilfred…

Nostradamus Dies of Gout. Nostradamus Dies of a Broken Heart. Nostradamus Crosses a Bridge that is Yet to be Built.

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Nostradamus died of gout on a Friday evening. He would be the first person in history to die of complications relating to gout. Spiked rods of crystallized uric acid pushed their way through his synovial fluid just as he composed a quatrain about the end

Borges in the SUB

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"There's Borges."

Ancestry.comedy

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all paths converge on Africa/ and Eden, and the fall from animal grace

March

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The lungs forsake their love of breath. The arms/ resist throwing off the small weight of sheets.

We All Fall Down

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I didn’t give her enough skin. The world will always hurt her.

I'll be Home for Christmas

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She hasn't called me in days. Before calling her, I search my memory for something romantic to say. Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 says exactly what I'm thinking. But she doesn't need to hear it. She already knows, as all human efforts come to an end, my core energies are tapering…

Eleutheria

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She watched an inky cloud suck all the color / from the trees.

Royal Coachman

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" trout hovered in a sun-dappled pool"

Unintended Consequences

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...you pile into your Mercury and barrel down the street, the air smells like sea, the night goes forever...

From The Chronicles of His Demise

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I am not the wind./ I am a stone eroded by the wind

21stC irl (easy action) party

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Nobody took pics.

Breaking Curfew (and Other Short Stories)

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Money’s tight

Almonds

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"... you shake your head and look down as if I am a mongrel dog who has pissed the Tabriz..."

I Had Time to Kill

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I had time to kill. I got on the merry-go-round, letting it go slow, thinking of starting blocks, how I might push off them.

Zumba, Meet Depression

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The decision is made. I am going to a Zumba class. What better way to achieve behavior modification than to leave my TV and fuzzy bear slippers behind for some hot Latin aerobics in a strip-mall? I try to pull my hair into a ponytail that will make the two inches of…

Time

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Tell Bono I want my seventy bucks back.

Hot Dish

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Millie was a good woman, Bobby said. A good Christian woman. Well, I said, you can’t hold that against her.

What the Dark Matter Says

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There can be no convergence./ There is only the talking that talks about/ an angle of sight nothing else can share.

The Hamburger Story

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I didn’t like her. I like the name. You know I hate that name. I always thought you were funny. Maybe even more than you were mean.

The Secret Life

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When we were very young, we didn't tell because we didn't know any better. Now we are six, and we don't tell because no one has believed us since we told the story about the vampire upstairs. Now we're twelve, and we don't tell because our family's weird enough, living…

Lost in Suomi

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Wind pummeled me awake, smelling of pine and some quality of newness I could not identify...

Where the ocean ends

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For my Dad Happy Father's Day!