Most discussed stories

Exchange Rates for Zynga

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When farming started in September, I thought of gambling, of my childhood best friend’s marriage ruined due to gambling, and of farming as a trope for living in the Midwest.

The Object of Desire

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I was born to be desired, stamped with the insignia of my creator, and folded in precious, shimmering materials. If the fate of my co-createds holds true for me, then this covering was further covered with the name of my creator, printed on materials too rough ever to touch…

Cherry Stem

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He moved his rotten breath closer to my mouth, like he wanted to twirl his tongue around just to see how it felt.

Hollywood Forever

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Johnny and Dee Dee Ramone crack open an Old Bushmill’s and offer John Huston a pull.

100 Words

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She thinks this is the place she dreamed

Sidewalk Cafe at Night: van Gogh

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while the fat stars stand out in the cobalt night.

My Bunny Hop Years

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The Bunny Hop represented that riot-like atmosphere–in cuddly guise–described by Claude Levi-Strauss in his seminal essay that I have forgotten the name of it’s so important.

I Don't Want to Go to the Bronx

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"... each of them stuck in one finger to sample the goods. Just then Katie felt a breeze on her bare legs. Her skirt literally moving."

Back East

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Could even drift off to New Orleans for a slow sip of a hurricane

2

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Then I am in Washington DC impersonating an accountant.

Odysseus Remembered

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Years later Polyphemus still remembers the wine-soaked taste of Odysseus’s men. The barley and garlic-flavored Greeks. Their flesh a fibrous, blood-hued hummus. Their crunched bones releasing sweet marrow.

SWAMPLANDS by Paul D. Brazill

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Elvis awoke in a cold, dank sweat, hungover from bourbon and bad dreams.

ALL THE BASTARDS AND ME

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The apartment was a second-level place, so I went down the steps and looked through the stained glass window of the door. “Ah hell,” I said to myself. Raymond Carver and John Fante and Charles Bukowski were outside. I opened the door.

Erasing the Modern World

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An electromagnetic pulse/ scrubbed the servers./ The clouds wisped and blew away, empty./ Markets lost what little mind they had.

Gertrude

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When we were young and small we played in the orchard. Mom made apple pies and fried apples, caramel apples and apple sauce, apple cider. Grandma’s apple butter recipe.

Cupcake Footprint

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once wedding cake under pillows. now fluffy frosting on squashed defeat

25 Cents at a Time

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He never bothered converting the tip money he pocketed at the Imperial Street 24 hour car wash as his world was replete with 25 cent transactions, making quarters the perfect coin for his realm.

mondays get all the heat

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when i was five or six/ we lived in an apartment/ and every sunday/ i'd lie on the carpet/ to watch squares of sunshine/ crawl across the rug/ while my mother inflicted upon us/ a centuries-long hour of television/ worse than any droning mass.

A Session With My Poetry Coach

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“Please excuse the form letter, but due to the volume of god-awful submissions that we receive, we do not have the time to crush the spirit of each writer personally.”

Desire

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She said “I have to go”, he answered with his eyes “Don't” and they stepped closer to each other in the kitchen, a step on the tiled floor, the remnants of their tea cold on the counter top.

Arborist Abridged

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Besides, that might have been the area of his birth, and if so, Jacob was now the director, priest, pallbearer, driver, and custodian of a hometown funeral

George Martian (psych eval)

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PROSPER CENTRAL SCHOOLS PSYCHOEDUCATIONAL EVALUATION CONFIDENTIAL Prosper Central…

The Old Man and the Cigarette

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Flicking the cigarette into the river the man's face becomes soft, as if waving goodbye to the only real attachment that he has felt in decades.

Love apathy

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I smell it, it smells/Of giggles and leg shaking

Prairie Flowers

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As a kid he had run away from the family farm and shoveled coal back East to put himself through college. Now he was just another old man in a nursing home, desperate for a drink, his blue eyes bleary, a sticky goo filming at the corners of his lips.

Strings Go

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This woman is naked to the waist and then nakeder below that.

Constable Pulce and the Sunny Dystopia

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Alessandro was no ordinary demon (what demon is?), insofar as he had Constable Pulce's number. In demonly fashion he had Pulce's number in a way Pulce himself did not.

21st Century Living

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there should be a word for it.

The first sunny day of Spring

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Paulie opens the curtains in his bedsit to sunshine. And blue skies! He basks in it for a full minute, feeling the heat on his naked body.

Phyllis Shapely

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In December of 2003, Daniel Arredondo succumbed to his years long battle with colon cancer. If the name is unfamiliar, you're not alone. He did not answer to the name Daniel Arredondo. For most of his life, from seventeen years old to the end, in fact, he went by the name…