Most discussed stories

CHINTZ PICKLE

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What if she doesn't take me seriously? My sweaty testimony wedged tight behind the tragic I used to think was honest? What if, right? What if . . . Isolation Real men feel that, right? They have …

Featherweight

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As the torrent hit her, she felt her body slipping, sinking, and suddenly she didn’t know where the floor was in relation to her feet.

Moon Over the Downs - excerpt

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Each drip off the corrugated plastic sheeting made a tinny sound that he could hear from deep within the damp sleeping bag and layers of blankets where he was trying to sleep.

Uniquely Portland

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He saw his mother standing over him, and he called out to her for help, but she only laughed and faded into the paper towel dispenser.

Sanguine

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Gripping the sink, head bowed, I let the blood gather on the rim of my nose, pooling for a moment, before its fleeting journey towards the basin.

The Frog

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Publisehd in Linguistic Erosionhttp://www.linguisticerosion.com/2014/08/the-frog.html When Jesus and Magdalene began to cross the sunflower field they met a group of boys, squatting before a rocky outcrop. Covered with…

Recipe for the Broken

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This poem first appeared in “Walt’s Corner” of The Long Islander, founded by Walt Whitman in 1838.

The Violent Kind

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But my point is, this isn’t a Thomas Kinkade. It’s not like you can pay me fifty dollars and I can drive to the Twombly store and buy another Twombly.

Knots

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She sees her first husband on the bathroom floor, ingrained in the wood.

She’s a Maniac

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New Year's Eve 1984: I was a hit with my outfit. When I walked into the house, a teenage girl looked me up and down and said, “Nice knickerbockers.” My cousins dragged me to the living room floor which was crowded with my family dancing and I started…

Edward Ogle the Andy

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Concrete coffeecake drumbeat gyrate Andy Rooney ran a meter.

Good for the Gander

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“This isn’t fair!” I rail to my late wife. “It’s all right for you, why not me?” She never answers me directly. Not in whispers, or with knocks, or even dreams.

Biography / Memoir (outline)

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Larry's next book, A Fly in My Ointment, is due out this summer

Victoria Gate

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Maybe she was crying before she got on the coach at Marble Arch, settled in the seat across from me, but by the time we reach Victoria Gate, tears stream down her face, mouth open to receive her own sacrament.Indian, ageless in tasteful floral, a blue sweater despite summer…

Mommy Dearest

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His daddy died in his sleep. Went to bed one might and never got up.

Pro and Contra in Sepia Black

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From decade to decade, editorial opinion swings and sways as to whether the fault of volubility resides chiefly with the practitioner or with the lawless company he keeps.

Midnight Snack

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I was about to answer when that something emerged from the woods. It was not an animal, after all, but a woman dressed all in brown. She ap­proached our porch windows. I shuddered and turned away. But her com­ing was inevitable. When I turned back, she

Snowed-in March Against the Beautiful Pain Memory of Love, A Ghazal

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Infinite patience, tempered glass hearts—is this what it takes? / Shatterproof backtrack, slow march through reversals—too, what it takes.

Blood

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We decide not to go to the emergency room

the oracle withers, because it is so late

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I remember some of the tight-fitting garments you wore, your looks seeping through them. The light blonde hairs at your neck and at your middle. Were we really expected to keep our hands off each other? It is foolish to think so. I know what I was think

Spring Cleaning for Poets

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“Can you do something about that those four stanzas of three lines each at the bottom of the basement steps?” my wife asked. "That's a villanelle I'm working on."

Hush

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You think you are a perpetual motion machine, free of thermodynamic law. I’m telling you, you’re wrong.

Edward Ogle the First

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Vundabar baclava

Hindsight

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You were a mine field

So Sweet

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    I met a girl so sweet, So sweet that she could Break your heart   No girl, no one should Be so sweet So sweet that she melts My depression   Increase my anxiety   No one should be so sweet   More like a little girl Than her 25 years   If…

Last Stop

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So we stayed on the train admiring the time.

Double Vision

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Maybe it’s the cold that has me seeing double. My sister in Florida would probably laugh, “I told you so” as she sips her pumpkin latte in the barely-cold.

Flight

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I know what to expect because this has happened before. The darkness, the stench of an unlit match, The leathery sound of old wings flapping and finally that voice made up of feces and dust, ancient and terrible suggesting depravity and painful deaths t

XAM, PARAGRAPH, May 22, 1998, Houston, Texas

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I wrote this paragraph (the first in a series of 14 paragraphs) shortly after Frank Sinatra had died and during my last visit to my boyfriend, M. He had not seen me write something in years.

Luz Maria

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Although badly educated, and although the Michoacána fought to deny it, she held the complex notion that borders are not abrupt lines, simple artifacts of geography and cartography.