Most discussed stories

Basics

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When the whistle drops, do not take any guff.

Love

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Trent’s had many phases: Madonna, Bette, leather, water sports, rollerblading, haiku, chicken queen, rice queen, muscle queen, daddy. But religion? This is new.

Linear A

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let’s press our words into the clay/ in language so completely dead/ we have to re-imagine it.

Independent Living

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The transformation in their domineering, sour mother revised her children’s memories of their childhoods.

Whale Lessons

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Even if your heart is as large as a small car, your tongue as heavy as two grown men—even then—you will have to carry it with you wherever you go.

Not Calculable

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saw the world was a mess I did nothing about it, poured myself some apple juice

The Road to Ensenada

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One of the men leaned over and spit long and dark next to where the dog lay curled. He said something about the senora, and the other men laughed.

Transformations

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Some nights now I sit at my window

Unwanted Stories: A Public Service Advisory

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Unfinished, deeply flawed stories require the kind of handling you see in movies where a Virus That Will Doom Mankind is disposed of by scientists in hazmat suits.

Listening to Neil Young on a Gray Day and Understanding Clearly What My Grandfather Told Me Long Ago

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I'm a lot wiser now but so what?

The Uninvited Guest

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The first time I see her, she is slouched in a tire swing, pushing off with one foot and dragging the other beneath a dying pecan tree that probably hasn't made a nut in 20 years.

House Rabbit

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I would be proud to be your house rabbit. I make this case: I will listen flop-eared close to your every concern and exhultation. If I doze off nudge me. I wake quickly.

A Slick Story

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After Slick Daddy — aka Billy Ray Thompson — gave up driving his log truck and took up with playing and singing the blues full-time he was what you might call a hot property around the juke joints along Highway 61. The women didn't seem to mind…

Like Trial and (Also) like Error

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We sat all in a muffledlittle line up, on theconcrete lips of tomorrow'ssleepy chin, like all the world's good little children should, as the paradelimped itself slowly by, slapping itself against the young day'sexcitement like a damaged flattire, trying its…

Regret

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Every time I read a great line by another writer, I feel fear.

Mouth Manifesto

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I want you to kiss me like you’re listening to my tongue. I want you to hear the rhythm of my heart through my lips. Can you feel what I’m telling you? If you’re entering my borders, it doesn’t matter where - my mouth, my pussy, my ear... you’d better pay

Ilonka's Hagaddah

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So then we had to worry about the Russian soldiers. When they heard we were Jewish, they said “How come the Germans didn’t kill all of you?”

The Street to Here

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poem

Trip the Rime

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politics only add to assault and distract

Window

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Can you write a 250-word story without using the letter "e"? Ruth's back is curving forwards, folding, softly caving into tomorrow.

falling

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I arrange my stones in circles

are you a life force?

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are you afraid sometimes, in the night, in the wind as it beats down your maelstrom thoughts?

Bison

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To make extra money, my father wrote music reviews for the Calgary Herald, and on Saturday nights, he went to hear the Symphony, or into recital halls to listen to the chamber music that was being performed around the city. He took me, once, to a performa

The Wreck of Me

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“You’re a hard habit to break,” I said. My tongue was flaring. Flirting with nurses was my father’s thing.

Happiness

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Can you find happiness in the middle of a kidney stone attack?

I Knew Her

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We met in the theater.

Barn Owl

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I was out of my element. I was on property that wasn't mine. In a woods with mansions tucked away among the trees.

A Team of Horses

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He had coal black hair the day he died. He claimed to be part French, no doubt the offspring of a Swedish girl and a French soldier, although Ole did not mention this.

Tilly Artaud

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After not going out for weeks, I went to a bar and met an electrical engineer, a motorcycle racer who raced in the Black Hills, a Renaissance man, in a relationship with a young married woman, and I told him about the toad.

The Boys

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The Boys The Boys, they call my brothers in the neighborhood, or Those Boys. The Taylor Boys. Sometimes, Mom calls them Thing One and Thing Two, like in The Cat in the Hat. Those bad boys. Nobody has brothers like my brothers, kicked off the school bus, barred…