Most discussed stories

Auto Imperative

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I drove to you in April / and you loved me all through Illinois

Central Washington State On Five Dollars A Day

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The tailfins of our ’57 Plymouth Fury dip and rock from the stress: Three boys—say no more?—jumping into the car. And Dad, loading suitcases into the trunk, working them around the steel cooler heavy with Cokes, root beers, ice. He slams the trunk lid dow

Off the record

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Writers, hopeful ones, hopeless ones, poets and petty penmen, worked as bartenders, librarians, substitute teachers, anything.

Mayweather

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where I'm from

The Galleries

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We invent our beauties// as we find them and engineer/ our horrors

Interview

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The ethnographer turns on a recorder. The story began before but that is lost, like it never happened.

My Son Thinks He's French

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My son thinks he's French.His accent was cute at first, but it's starting to get on my nerves. If he asks for another glass of Beaujolais I'm gonna go to jail for child abuse.Yesterday, I walked upstairs to make him turn his new Jacques Brel album down and I swear it…

I Remember Kitty D.

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When the car arrived, Kitty bounded out, lipstick-stained cigarette dangling, silver hair tightly teased. We could not escape her hug, smelling of peppermint and Aqua-Net and Jean Nate.

Still Life in a Bowl

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I sprinkle seaweed over the water and all twelve rise to feed. Two of them went down the hole but knew to come up. A toilet has mouths and caverns, not a bad place at all for fish.

Mercury Unbound - 4

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The music, Antonín Dvořák's 'New World Symphony,' the second movement, 'Largo,' immediately alters my mood.

Morning

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Leaves dance their way down,unfazed by this September heat. Bus stop routines set already-summer ended years ago.A chipmunk scampers undera parked truck while once againthe young man does his morning…

Four Thousand Dollars from Baghdad

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“This is the most dangerous road in the world and you want to drive down it. You crazy,” he said.

Postcard

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A tiny story, 55 words, just enough to fit on a . . .

Zoo Story

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I tell my friend, the animal lover, not to get too near the panther's cage. "Why not?" she asks. "You'll see," I say.

Slight of Hand

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Our ironies don’t make us happy

The Mirror Tires of Looking at Itself

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Sure, to a teacher, life is a paper / but what would life be to a druggist?

Gas Making You Sick?

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It was a sore molar that was giving me trouble, on the bottom right. The dentist, about whose adulterous affairs everybody in the neighborhood knew and whispered about, ts-ts-ts'ed me and murmured "decay" before pulling out the drill.

Solzhenitsyn Juke-Box

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My handwriting, slow in coming over many years, is good for lists, but I don't want to read sentences or write in it. Amber is on a list I wrote of things I want to remember of Russia: Rasputin's death and Peter the Great (6'7”). One of my lists I read as a poem in…

When a Bowl Hits a Tree

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You would think when a bowl hits a tree the sound would be fierce, a loud clatter as stoneware explodes on birch bark dispersing shards in daffodils and grape muscari, but the noise is gentle, a thudding clink like empty bourbon bottles rattling hollow in…

Moving Day

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I didn’t hear that Duncan Pratt had been killed until I’d been out of the Army for two weeks and had gone four days without a single thought about that final year in Vietnam.

Restaurant Rondo

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Before she flushes the toilet the world is spinning.

Desilu, Three Cameras

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Ricky imagines bending her over his conga, yanking that bushy dark ponytail like reins and ripping into her. He sits, watches, legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. He needs a dancer for the Jezebel number now that Connie is showing. This girl would make a f

Texas Weather

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I know this: the sky is vast here// and the sun unforgiving/ to any architecture not the best

Secondhand: Four Inscriptions

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To whoever reads this next--Henry James makes my head hurt.

Dunes

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I went out through another cold still morning erasing my steps behind me not because I did not want to be followed but because I did not want to find my way back again.

jewels

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it is said to make your manliness last forever

Snapshots

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Jake remembers that Amy told him once that she thought that somehow he would always be a part of her life. That was before she went to Spain and married an American bull fighter.

Subj: re: doing time ...

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The jail, where I stayed for 48 hours, gave me enough information to write a 180-page book, something I resisted setting out upon due to the insult of it.

Baby Love

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She wanted one, she said. She wanted one who looked like me. I wanted one, because I wanted her. I wanted her for everything; I wanted her to fill every crack and space inside of me.

Lost Love Poem

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Was that the door slamming?