Most discussed stories

Gehryspeak

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IN nature, it's hard to find a straight line. Stand on a beach. Look out to sea. There out far you might think you see a line where the sky comes down to join. Where two fields of blue meet. But where you're not quite sure for the line is a blur there. You…

MISCELLANEOUS SHORT SHORTS

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Maybe you, citizen, should be a jerk. Jerks get where they are going. You, citizen, what about you? Handy, dandy, where’s the jerk? Conformists. Sheep. All of you, all of us, boiling out our radiators. Spending our day, our days, our lives in coope

Pleasure (it was) after all...

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I'm gonna write about this after...It'll either be a tale of pain or pleasure hopefully the latterI don't understand how this workswhy sometimes I want to hide from myself other times I can just give in, fully,and everything isohsoheightenedI want it to be beautifuland…

Mezzanine

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I am i said pursued by the feeling of being watched.You are she said -- by yourself. As in a dream, a dream you know you're dreaming. Which changes nothing.We are she said watching from the mezzanine, half-above, at once a part and apart.

Granny's Reform School Weekend Intensive Workshop, Session One

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Being a grandparent is most joyous when deliberately subversive.

February

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a big silent western sky

Blind

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In this coaly no-time/ strewn with fallen stars,/ you are a roaming panther/ and I am a tangle of snakes.

Prayer to Ray Bradbury

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Dear Ray Bradbury, yesterday was my thirteenth birthday, and I could not stop thinking of the Mennonite girl in the milkwhite bonnet, the squint of her eye, the twitch of her anxious finger on the trigger, sudden holes bloomi

Beowulf Is Pillow

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Now that school is back in session, we move through our days like cage fighters, tagging in and out of matches: The Battle of the Bottle, The Diaper Duel, The Pout Bout. So while I'm assembling a casserole for tomorrow, Susan feeds Margot. While she washe

take

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THERE'D been mutterings on the shareholders' board about a dodgy deal shoved through. In the rush after the towers' thing to get out relevant stock an executive producer had signed off on some film school kid for five big ones to shoot a…

Adultery and Africa

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“What would you think if I committed adultery?” She pauses very briefly before replying. “What, you got time on your hands?”

underwater with their thumbs

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And your daughter, Mrs. P, and your daughter Mrs. Q, underwater, underwater in the old swimming hole, in the backyard swimming pool. “They’ve all got children there.” La la. Yet when I’m naked, when I enter with my own body the mirror, the small sha

Shredded

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"...you are a freak of nature..."

Typing Right On Fictionaut, Take 1

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We went driving on Sundays.

Insufficient

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We have read your book, but regret to inform you that it is insufficient. This is not to say that you as a person are insufficient, simply that your writing is. When you asked us what percentage of manuscripts we found sufficient, we told you, “Less tha

The After

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I watched her look at mewithout any eyes.She turned her head as wesat on the edge of the bed.Instead of eyesthere were hollow indentations of soft tissue,bulbs, and closed,tissue sown, pinched togetherwith pulls and zigzagslike crosshatching, where…

Honesty

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Bill decided he hated his neighbors on a Sunday morning in June.

Monkey Business

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Benjamin stands beside his bed and unpacks his few things – wire cutters, knife, tape, line, two blocks of C-4, wallet, brush, and a small stuffed animal – a monkey.

Gazpacho

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It's a pretty strange feeling when you think you're about to bite into some ice cream and instead it's gazpacho.

The Artist Wannabe

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Hot Weather

How the Other Half Lives

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Most of life, it turns out, is pathetic. Very little is funny. We have to generate our own laughter. Canned laughter may have to do. Even if we have to carry the can around our neck like a Saint Bernard or strapped to our hip

Imagination Factory

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I sit in a small office amongst a huge pile of letters picking out individuals and arranging them on a big square made of something like paraffin

Three Little Ditties from a Twenty First Century Feminist!

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I Am My VoiceRegimes may throb and dreams may smoke but my sisters' thoughts they'll not revoke. Through rock that quivers, through concrete stream, our reds and yellows, they'll dazzle and teem. My womanliness need not be feminine not that the feminine…

Frankenstein's Monster Eats the Brains of Virgins at the Witches' Chainsaw Orgy Massacre

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If Heaven holds forth its own Infinity, What of selves, of ours, could we stand to see? Cradled with harsh fangs of Memory, Deep forgetfulness, give rather me- Let bright dreams be our self's divinity: Forever holds, in morrow's hours, such little…

reality concedes, for once

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beckoning with citrus streaks blue cobbled streets/and stuccos lit with gold lamps guide strollers here/to Place du Forum in Arles and this café . . .

ScarCity

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I flipped a large cardboard coin On one side it said Abundance But on the other side it said Scarcity I went to the store And began packing everything I could get Into my shopping cart But the things that started spilling over Onto the

Birding

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Even mockingbirds are scarce;

The Sickness of your Genius

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This is not about you Although you are stone cold and sexy

ekphrastic and somatic verses

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in clotted abattoirs where Sorley saw: / no animals shorn of their skins and flesh / could spy with envy the men killing them.

Have You Seen Me?

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It’s as she reaches into the fridge for the carton of half-and-half with the grainy waxy photo of the little girl—Last Seen 10/2/06—that the memory surfaces: “Hey. That’s mine.”