Most discussed stories

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…

Fascination

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Lying all over itself...

I Would Make the Worst Cable News Anchorwoman Ever

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I'd laugh, cry, splutter with confusion or outrage. I'd probably say “Duh” a lot, grow pale, flush, and wink at the viewers. I'd furrow my eyebrows, raise one or both, and my eyes would narrow, widen,…

Sloth

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(Insert poignant line here)

Moles & Scraps

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A starved hunchbacked figure covered in blanket gently steers a one eyed dog along with him. A four legged shadow serving as his longtime companion against the all-consuming vacuum of the universe. A friend for all times.A thin scar runs from his cheekbone to…

3 Poems

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We have always been a trashy species./ We study ourselves by examining/ garbage-- a pile of mussel shells here,

Lucky Strike

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...when they entered eager lungs hungry from deep and sweaty love

R.I.P. Ann Bogle

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It is with great sadness I announce the passing of Ann Bogle on February 28, 2023 after a brief illness. Ann was longtime contributor and editor of these pages and a champion of small press and emerging writers.I knew Ann since the late 1970's when she was an undergraduate…

Small Potatoes

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I kiss his sunburned nose, so nice under the beach house. We hear the shower of palm leaves like wings getting ready. We talk about a time we'll no longer know each other, when he'll be sad in a bar in another state, slipping and sliding and petting lost dogs in the parking…

DNA

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my family's Scottish heritage

from: A Body Divided

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When I came back home, after coming down with polio, everything had changed for me. I'd been gone for forty-five long days and nights. But it was Halloween, a time very nearly sacred for children in the Midwest, and it brought out the charity of the who

The Color Spectrum Fiasco

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On the very day I was fired from Penn State, in 1971, I was also kidnapped by a short-lived underground student revolutionary group who spelled their own name wrong. They shoved me into the backdoor of a yellow rusted-out car on Atherton Street, blindfolded me. A…

The Body in the Other Room

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I couldn’t parse the grammar of her body nor decode the secret softness of her neck.

Remembering Daffodils

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the burning thrusts/ of yellow in defiance of the frost

Tchotchkes

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Each little token is the world/ as you knew it at each time and place

gathering

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the moon tops the monolith

Repatriation

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When he woke he carried the body of a cat instead of a man. Next to him his cat dreamed it had a human body.

tchotchke

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tuck me

The Ballad of the Summer Grains

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It is a day of swallows and grasshoppers, of white clouds and suntanned arms. In the yellow field wheat ears burn, lit by fantasies. One of wheat, one of rye. Summer love, holiday love is in the air. Under the thickness of the harvest, their roots search, call each other.…

Three Short Fictions

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We were to eat just meat and to become discombobulated over vegetables and bread and not to indulge in sex with strange men—men were all strange once you got used to their distance—were Lincoln logs, poles, boulders and scrub trees.

quarried

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a chosen cantaloupe a child let loose . . .

The Sound Of Zippers In Context

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There is, between us, a flickering lantern. We're not tired yet but the bugs are converging and hitting the side of the tent. The little ones, the mosquitoes, the gnats, the noseeums, they're finding their way in in spite of the zipped up mosquito nettin

Methaphor

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Red is a boy...

19__, What I Wanted

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A snap.

My baby

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The nightmares started in the seventh month. I have always been a deep sleeper and one of the things that comes with that facility is an inability to extricate oneself from nightmares.

profanity

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@#$!

Merry-Go-Round

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“Stop!” I shouted. “I want to get off!” The toothy horses showed me the whites of their crazy eyes. “No, no”! they chorused as they whirled around and around and around.