Most discussed stories

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 . . .

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.

Marcel Unchained

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Street mime in white face and white gloves, trapped in invisible box. Tip jar empty. Marcel's solo-dancing the tango now, teeth clenching ephemeral rose. Passersby pass him by.

Accounting

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It shouldn’t take that long to count/ to six but when the six are cats, arithmetic/ assumes Heisenbergian properties/ as the objects counted defy the count.

Major Chaos

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Major Chaos came here one of those hot days. I was washing the floor, wearing old clothes, when he knocked on my door. Since I don’t have many visits, I let him in. At first, he seemed like a soldier, but upon reflection I realized he was a big green fr

Woman

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When you move to the music of a woman

Nightmare

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I loved to visit my grandparents when I was a kid.

Dinner at the Harmony Restaurant

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Balling my fists, I banged them on the retro-formica tabletop. The taste of pufferfish balls in an oleander-infused reduction with a seaweed and pomegranate side-salad tossed in a geranium-rottweiler vinaigrette rose in my throat.

Blue Ridge

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...swallowed like a radiant yolk by an epicurean barracuda.

Welcome Back

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I lean forward and take her two hands in mine. I look into her eyes. “It’s you and only you,” I say. She starts to cry.

Everybody Needs a Soul

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They are running the bulls in Pamplona this afternoon and they have no idea how to do this and they are way too old for this and they want to relive their youth and run the bulls in Pamplona They want to drink like Ernest Hemingway and run