Most read stories

Greetings from 17-E

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Remember the glass changing room just off the pool terrace? It's been replaced by a juice bar. Seems fitting, really.

Dr. Wong

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Hippy health food. It all began with Hannah’s homemade granola.

Sack of Meat

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The Nurse left work at five o’clock, walking down Dekalb Avenue toward Flatbush. He didn’t frequent the bar closest to the hospital, although he guessed other nurses and doctors from Brooklyn Hospital did. But he liked to pretend that he cared about h

Toward a Critique of Everything Existing

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You got a lot of people, out there

Pink

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The midsummer sky is black above us when I hear Dad say my name, quiet like I’ve never heard before. I let my hands drop away from my face and crawl towards him.

Welcome to our community

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“Yeah, she's a real slut,” many contestants' mothers say. “If he could only keep it in his pants, he'd probably be able to stay in the country,” others say about their sons

Last Poem

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or the voice that wants/ to be inscribed/ forgets the sounds

The Night

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her parents were gone they sat on the love seat side by side saying nothing the longest time

Some Kind of Change

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She was flying back in the morning, returning to a long-distance boyfriend I believed she had cheated on while she was here but didn’t ask about because I thought it would have been too obvious and somehow ungentlemanly.

What She Gave to the Sea

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1.There's a young woman in a nightclub seated next to a window out of which she watches the slow descent of snow, illuminated by strategic lights. She imagines herself falling with those flakes. Her friend has left her for the dance floor. The young woman is…

WE NEVER

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No news spreads faster than news of a death. Word of the death of a child can be heard simultaneously in a thousand places. . . the word spread by telephone, in back yards from clothesline to clothesline, with whispers in grocery stores, in the looks on faces stunned into…

The Bird King in Love

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1The Bird King has fallen in lovewith a radiator.He adoresher pockmarked skin,her neurotic arias,her coldness,her impulsive warmth. 2Tiring of his dalliance with the radiator,the Bird King woos an armchair.She's amply upholsteredand groans dreamilywhen he sits on…

Middle Age

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There are no city-chewed streets,/ only white and lilac blooming dogwood trees.

Circling '84

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Other things are on my mind when the Tupperware lady says, "First, let's move your couch over by the door and the table here."

Tumbalalaika

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When the arguing started, their voices would get louder and louder, till they broke into my dreams. That night, I woke and listened in the dark for what felt like a very long time. Perhaps I should have been afraid, but I wasn't. For one thing, they never

Confiding in the Airsick Bag

19781978 views33 comments22 favs

In row nine, there was a lady on the window seat. Seeing the potential of space between us, I asked, “Mind if I take this one?” “Not at all” she said as if she hadn't a friend in the world, apart from the poor bastard now sitting in seat 9D.

Lethargy

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‘Your hands are very clean’ she said to the furniture salesman. His name was Morrison. "After Jim" Morrison Pentworthy. His father specialized in Doors.

Fat Man in a Blizzard

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There he was. Minnesota Fats, short and pudgy, jowly and blond-haired.

The Last Quiet Morning

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Things don’t happen here, life is so boring in this little Irish town.

A monkey puzzle rocket burst

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The things we do for books, she thought.

Universal Theory #1: The 3-Step Secret to a Good Life

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1. Think up problems that don’t exist 2. Realize, suddenly, that they don’t exist 3. Elation

Night Swim

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She wrapped her legs around him. His hand barely held the rope and later he could not have said if it happened above or below the water’s surface.

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.

Biography

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There is a price. It's on the back. If you turn it around you'll see. It isn't expensive. Everything's okay.

American Triptych

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It’s always fun and easy/ to punish the poor

This is Why We Can Never Have Nice Things

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At age eleven, I murder the coffee table. I gouge with every available implement: thumbtacks, Lefty scissors, the plastic hand of my Barbie accomplice (who really should have known better). It is a slow death. In the end, there is nowhere to hide the body. When I am…

Buoyancy

19771977 views22 comments11 fav

When I ate with my girls, Bliss and Victoria, I would lift my head up and look at us eating until I could imagine him chiding me. “Our daughters are looking more and more like you each day,” he’d say. “Fat!” I didn’t feel like eating when I thought abo

How to Forget

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Refuse to go to the church service, even though you already missed the funeral. Tell his mother something came up. Call his phone over and over, just to hear his voice, until his mother asks you to stop. Make a recording of his voicemail. Delete it an

Men Respond to Women's Tennis Grunts With Armpit Farts

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An armpit fart is a simulated sound of flatulence produced by creating a pocket of air between the armpit of a partially raised arm and the hand, then swiftly closing this pocket by bringing the arm close to the torso.

Wounded Knee

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“They picked me up in their spaceship about noon,” Austin Grantham says to me while pulling up an apple crate to use as a stool.