Most discussed stories

consolations

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we swim in failure

Cast Off Thy Suffering

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Somewhere along tomorrow, I will forget I have the right to do this.

A Shadow on the Summer Sun

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Shadows are so admirable in film noir less so on x-rays and mammograms

Of Tongue and Cheek

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Our beautiful currencies and stamps/ disappear into the digital vortex/ of accelerated appetites.

Blinding Light

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Snow sheeted on the river...

Stranger and the green gloves

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Yet More from The Chronicles of His Demise

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The Muse//has used/ me up

The Law of Natural Selection

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Once a student brought him a jar of black widow spiders. Tony put it on his desk. Somehow the jar got tipped over, and the spiders got out.

Testament (complete)

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Their nouns are few and stark./ Ours are numerous and dappled/ or subtly shaded and shadowed/ by circumstance and possibility.

Quitting

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The dancer was a little chubby, but I didn't mind. It gave her more to shake.

Landing

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She’s witnessed her mother’s terror on the day of the hurricane, and she demanded for the first time in her life that her mother do something her mother did not want to do.

Hemingway for Gloria

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He disliked intrusion and very specifically innocuous intrusion, nice guys, one might say, who tried to be near him to learn something from him or who admired him but who, as in that passage, came merely to disturb his work.

Stroke One, Stroke Two, Stroke Three

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On Monday, May 7, 2018, at the age of 67, I had a stroke.

End of Shift

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He was losing his fight with malaria, but you would never know it from his dreams

The Bond Trader Goes Hunting

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The Bond Trader begins his morning with coffee and a hit of LSD.

Strange Bird

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shortest yet

Let the Others Drool

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They are all sleeping, but I know better. I will keep watch and if he comes tonight I will be alert and ready. When he arrives he'll see the slack mouths, the graceless sprawls, hear the grunts, snorts and snores of the other women and then he'll sense me. My eyes will…

Metaviews at Metazen

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This is self-reflection or self-reflexive writing. Candor but not verse. That is what I write: not-verse. On occasion I write a poem though rarely an occasional poem. Instead of calling it non-fiction we could call it non-verse.

The Shield

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A man and his wife are walking through a museum when the man sees a shield on the wall. Look at that! he says. Isn’t that remarkable? The two of them walk a little closer. What’s so remarkable about it? says his wife. Well, the workmanship! s

Ibambe

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If this was the day when the bribes of whiskey and US dollars would fail to work. If on this day a black bag, smelling of shit and fear, would be pulled over his head – the bloodied roots of a knocked out tooth tickling his neck.

Finger Weaving A Voyageur Sash

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Night's air awhirl, the sky shoots fireflies. Sometimes, she bleeds black arrows in her dreams.

Night & Day

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It was oddly quiet, and the air had a strangely urgent quality. The sun came out, and water on the leaves and branches turned oaks and aspens into Christmas trees.

I Take Out The Garbage

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I Take Out The Garbage

Over Fifty

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Yet it was another thing to grow to become indispensable to someone without whose infirmities the helper could not exist. People in general had started to call that helpless requiring “codependency,” but to Althea that word did no good,

Trapeze Artist

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Solitude is such an excellent alternative to suicide.

The Weight of Water

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Water and its damages followed Bianca. Every time she looked up. Everywhere she looked up. Up up up up. Water stains, in darkening whorls, curling across the drywall or fiberglass panels, filling them with rot and mold.

Featherbedding

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She sets the muffins aside, opens herself, nymph-like, mouth spread and gritty. She pulls the dirty edge of his gray t-shirt up so to show herself to him, spreads herself across the mattress like thin flesh oil over too much canvas....

The Poem Sits at Home and Envies as It Celebrates Music

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Translation’s not required—music/ sings itself complete and comprehensible

Lost among the Riff-raff

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Poor, pocked Ceres- dwarf planet/ trapped among mere asteroids-

deja not

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I haven't felt my soul leave my body