Most discussed stories

The Number Nine and The One After That

13951395 views55 comments44 favs

Johnny K. didn't much like taking his exotic drugs any more. He now thought that the common reality was already an intense enough trip without wrapping it all up in enough gauze to cause permanent daydreams to the head. He liked his cheap hamburgers…

Love Poem

13151315 views55 comments22 favs

I need to be not sure

Appreciating the Adagio because of Hardaway

10861086 views55 comments11 fav

Gary wrote in beautiful brevity of this most fabled story told with strings. Of it's breathtaking majesty and boundless power.

Tendencies

14471447 views55 comments55 favs

Will he do it with a gun? If it’s a gun, will it be a short one, shaved so he can hold it against his head. Will it look like the photograph he showed me, black and brown. I told him he couldn’t possibly buy something like that from a Walmart.

Please Help Support My Attempts at Being Funny

14521452 views55 comments44 favs

You can tell your doctor the truth Even if no one else will stop and listen He or she may have a balm for it To help make it go away Or at least go into remission Remission is the staging area for Lies Corporate and otherwise We don’t have

Steady Keel

23152315 views55 comments22 favs

He stands. Shoes for dashing, and he could dash, if the audience would stand for it, through one of two exits, beneath one of three wreaths. This year, the year of the Millennium, the wreaths seem dark and Germanic. The stage seems like a Great Hall set for a solitary…

Caffeine-Fueled Revelation Machines

22962296 views55 comments33 favs

So she leans over the patio table like that model in that magazine ad and then takes a sip of her blended coffee drink as if a director had said to pretend the straw is a penis. As if this director only just shouted, “And you're a dirty, dirty girl, and

This Pretty Business

12251225 views55 comments66 favs

Oh it's another one of those strange thrill rides slowly building from a buzz saw whisperinto cool morning's consciousness, coming on and crawling through the moon's mattress like a silver stream and under the dented pillow where…

Love Is All You Get

13671367 views55 comments33 favs

"All these people," Rammstein complained, "seems all they wanna do is write about love, and sex along with it, you know? And I think it's because it's all feelgood shit; you know, your sweet baby loves you, and he or she's hot as Angie or Brad, and…

Poem: The Two Week Vacation

14571457 views55 comments33 favs

The mother, a pony-tailed beauty, thinks she looks fat in her new blue-checked pedal pushers and white blouse tied under her full breasts— in the latest style.

Cheese

13661366 views55 comments44 favs

So, my wife got fired from her job for being three minutes late five times. But he had it in for her, the fatty boss. He was lazy and she was smart, in line for his job. And she had a workman's comp case against the hospital—she'd slipped in pudding in the cafeteria…

The Truth

18071807 views55 comments55 favs

His people eat soggy casseroles and smile with tight lips.

Burma

17931793 views55 comments33 favs

Our mothers died in childbirth. Taken in by the village, our new mothers taught us to wave at the river boats, to sell our trinkets to tourists. They offered us coins of a foreign currency and little pathetic smiles. By nightfall, our fingers bled. Then came…

4 Chapters

16181618 views55 comments44 favs

But I don't see the cabinets, or know how to put the 4 chapters he's talking about today into the drawers that are invisible, floating, above his bed he's been in for a year, me sitting next to him, becoming a spinster.

Exchange Rates for Zynga

19221922 views55 comments33 favs

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

32713271 views55 comments77 favs

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

19321932 views55 comments55 favs

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

14361436 views55 comments44 favs

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

100 Words

14931493 views55 comments55 favs

She thinks this is the place she dreamed

Sidewalk Cafe at Night: van Gogh

13331333 views55 comments33 favs

while the fat stars stand out in the cobalt night.

My Bunny Hop Years

14091409 views55 comments22 favs

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

15391539 views55 comments33 favs

"... 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

13851385 views55 comments33 favs

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

2

13801380 views55 comments55 favs

Then I am in Washington DC impersonating an accountant.

Odysseus Remembered

13761376 views55 comments55 favs

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

17441744 views55 comments22 favs

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

ALL THE BASTARDS AND ME

21022102 views55 comments44 favs

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

13821382 views55 comments33 favs

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

Gertrude

16841684 views55 comments44 favs

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

20882088 views55 comments00 favs

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