Most read stories

The Mosaic Thief

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Bit by bit I was traveling away, we thought. Maybe I’d join myself, all together, in Toronto. Or in an industrial coffee can. Or in the closet. “Check the closet,” I pointed.

Napomo 17: April 7-12

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The drinking will continue/ until morale improves

V-J Day

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August 14, 1945.Vincent had kissed a lot of girls before then - and a lot of women after. But there had never been a kiss like that one. And because of that photo apparently the whole country, damned near the whole world, thought so too.He'd tried to get her…

Prairie Rose

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Every Friday night she gets liberated at The Haymarket Square doing a bunny hop or a do si do with ex-members of The Saint Augustine Women's Choir. She remembers how as kids, shy or awkward in dresses, their voices formed the harmony, the flight of something V-shaped…

Only a Memory Away

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When Uncle Dan got sent to the Alzheimer's ward, the ladies licked their lips. Fresh meat.

Cripple

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"I know," Timothy explained, "he can't use it. He's a cripple." No one else seemed to understand.

A Bear Story

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In the spring, my father would dress for class in a bear costume and chase students around campus.

Test Day

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“I need an ambulance, we found a baby in a ditch.”

Perversion

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“It’s a sad thing,” I said, “when a man has to suffer just for getting a little on the side.”

What The Hell Nationality Are You?

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It’s confusing enough to grow up in a place like America, a country without definitive culture, except for ranch dressing and reality TV, but it’s even worse to grow up half one thing, half another, christened a hyphenation of names without connection to

Letter to the Bean Factory

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The figure was covered in a light blue chenille bathrobe, splayed out on her back on the floor by the glass door, her hair done up in large curlers, a slipper lying askew by her left foot. Richie crouched near the face and the rancid flame of bourbon lea

Mud

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People ask me sometimes what it’s like to meet your wife when you’re six years old, and I have to admit now that I don’t really understand the question. Marla and I, we were just friends for most of that time. She made me laugh. I let her crib off my math

Paperwork

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There were literally thousands of criteria that got people of every stripe and strata on the list, which had been maintained since before the very first human fingers scrawled crude images on blank surfaces. 

Contagious Blinking

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He pulls on his wispy goatee and shifts his weight a few times from one foot to the other. That doesn’t help. It rarely does, to be honest.

Arcana Magi - c.27: Hard Battle

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A burst of mud spilled out over Jonas and scooped his body up like a raging river. It spun his body over in a rebound rather than pushing him through the door.

Do you dream?

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Megalomania is a kind of backwards leprosy. It rots your insides out while your skin glistens and grows tighter around your bones.

Relativity

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It seems every time we get together, Seiko is there. She just started working in Keiko's department and now they're always together. I think Keiko feels responsible for Seiko. Like if Seiko's not getting any, it's bad manners for Keiko to do it.

The Strongest Girl in the World

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At the edge of the forest, his sister began to complain about how everybody—their mother and father and all of her friends included—hated her. It was exasperating, the light she sometimes put herself in. The fact of the matter was that she received more

Post-Op

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She tells Tuesday's lover that there's nothing wrong with cheap thrills without anesthesia,

Frostproof Suite: Saint John’s Eve

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Everyone at the Bermudez Brothers Combined Shows and Circus held one low opinion or another about Jimmy Dubcek.

Fear in a Handful of Dust / National Poetry Month 2015 30 Poems

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Fear in a Handful of Dust

Zombies Calling

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The zombie apocalypse was long foretold as a rather exciting bit of bother involving shotguns and chainsaws, but the reality of it is rather depressingly boring.

THE MOON, THE SUN, AND RYAN W. BRADLEY (not quite a fortune-telling)

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“That’s just Ryan W. Bradley—son of a bitch knows better by now.”

Wild Garden

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Even though it was late November, it still bloomed. Extravagantly. Obviously it had no shame, obviously it reveled in its own beauty.

A New Notion about an Old Story

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A dark girl, quite poor, maybe three, maybe four, leaned on a statue of a horse and his man. (The rider rode him in place, but as if in a race.) Her dress needed patching, her heart needed smoothing. She'd tried to sell…

77 Words About Nothing (Triad)

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My mind has started to finish thoughts at 77 Words. These are just a few.

The Crickets Try to Organize Themselves Into Some Raucous Pentameter.

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A secret search rolled from Odette's eyes. A gulch split her down the middle and she had the world believing this was the way she liked it. Odette was a woman who spent entire days bending backward within herself, never letting on that she was…

I Like You ‘Cause You Like Me

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And you don't like much. No handholding or brand name sweaters. No phone calls late at night. This is not you. And you certainly don't go for kisses in the rain or cards from the grocery store with…

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.

Birth and Death of a Concrete Icon

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Homer relaxes in his tan, faded recliner, remote in hand, and watches death unfold on his television.