Most read stories

In Machu Picchu

19751975 views55 comments11 fav

"I wonder what happened to Murder Man and Lust Girl?" wondered The Black Toadstool. The Anti-Justice League were in Machu Picchu, on a short vacation after taking over most of South America and the South Pole. The South Pole had been so easy. …

Crows and the Gunshot

19751975 views1111 comments99 favs

We'll Thelma-and-Louise it, I urged, Bonnie-and-Clyde it, she bettered, Sundance-and-Butch it, I proffered but she was already leaning in for a kiss.

Hummingbird hearts in a breadbox

19751975 views99 comments66 favs

We married in the ruins of a pachinko hall, the tiny bones in the pocket of your tracksuit luring a pack of wild dogs out from the underpass.

Far Star Girl

19751975 views88 comments33 favs

She thought maybe an angel had called out her name. She wasn't sure. She was waiting for her older sister to return with Jujy Fruits and bonbons. The theater, neither light nor dark, was to Cassie's ten-year-old mind, an appropriate-enough setting for a v

Boom

19741974 views66 comments22 favs

It was as if a car bomb went off in Beaver Cleaverville.

i went to raves & wrote songs

19741974 views66 comments33 favs

A short poem.

My Tongue

19741974 views1111 comments55 favs

A nun once told me to watch my tongue. This is not an easy thing to do.

The Soft, Cool Blanket of Night

19741974 views00 comments00 favs

wrap me in the soft, cool blanket of night. waning,the moon peers down at melike the heavy-lidded eye of some cyclops. and if I be lost like poor Odysseus,cloak me in the soft, warm wool of night. and if my eyes fail me like old Tiresias,stitch the cloth with…

Why Men Compete

19741974 views2222 comments1212 favs

It starts on the Fallopian Speedway

Half-and-Half

19741974 views22 comments11 fav

Terry worked in a factory out in Northlake where she added a little squirt of milk and another little squirt of cream to those tiny half-and-half coffee creamers you find at every motel in the country. The owner of that factory hired only women to work

86 the Conversation: A Side of Flat Screen TV with Your Burger?

19741974 views11 comment11 fav

This couldn’t be a bar; I was with my mother. It took a few seconds for the collision of senses to clear, and I realized the restaurant had not only one, but two flat screen televisions hung in their dining room, and a fake fire blazing in the fireplace.

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

19731973 views33 comments11 fav

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

C O N F L A T E

19731973 views55 comments22 favs

She jumped into the hole the other day. The hole that sucks little girls into the universe, and doesn't return them. I had to watch it. I had to watch her sitting on the dock. Lean over, and fall in. I couldn't have saved her. Nor God. Or Jesus. Not the bridge. …

Mabel Constructed the Quintessential Boundary.

19731973 views2222 comments1010 favs

Mabel constructed the quintessential boundary. She carefully boiled down her pots and pans, her jewelry, her copper kettle, and the foils from forty six bottles of white pear cider into a silky metallic stew. Mable smeared the mixture onto a burlap…

The Jewish Goodbye

19731973 views00 comments00 favs

"And secondly, it’s never bing bing bing with you. It’s like, bing bang bongity bumbity bum yadda yadda bla bla bla.” Sam stopped short and glanced down at his shoes. He knew he’d gone too far.

Obituary

19731973 views77 comments55 favs

He drifted for years: No forwarding. No phone.

En Pointe

19731973 views22 comments00 favs

Her gaunt arms softly rose, sweeping in front of her with movements that were hesitant at first but, as the music that only she could hear took her in its grip, became graceful and assured.

Sea Floor Fever, or The Note that Came With the Stone to the Head

19721972 views1212 comments1010 favs

I'm dying but that's not to say what you think it says. I've crossed the river of myself many, many times before and wandered to the shore, broken and drenched and full of the fever of dyingdreams. Each time was a kind of ritual mask, drying off the beat ofmy newly…

Note from the wilderness

19721972 views2727 comments77 favs

It's a business, after all, all are quick to remind us. True dat, and the sun always rises in the east and sets in the west, and death and taxes...yup yup, we know. We get it.

Gemma's Story

19721972 views1414 comments77 favs

I respect mom, she survived cancer and all while she was pregnant with me, but something about getting through all that crap made her heart tough, like an over-cooked piece of beef, and no one likes meat you have to chew forever.

Why They Cried: Jisette

19721972 views44 comments00 favs

There was that long weekend she'd spent lazing around a suite at the Beverly Wilshire between the Golden Globes and the Oscars with the suddenly now married actor, and then there had been Cabo. This was before the current thing and before the thing before

Little Green Rednecks

19721972 views00 comments00 favs

“I was listenin' ta one o' them Terran religious broadcasts 'bout Mother Earth when they up an' says that global warmin' was all the fault o' mankind, an' they had ta make the non-believers see that all the drivin' they did, an' all the stuff they bought

Paperwork

19721972 views11 comment00 favs

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. 

Harpoon

19721972 views99 comments66 favs

he’s recognizable in the earliest images of misery: a hand shoving a young gladiator before the lion; the fire devouring a witch in Salem. And here he is. Again.

Underwhelmed

19721972 views44 comments33 favs

fifteen together with a little streetart slamtrick

Bunny Ears

19711971 views00 comments11 fav

Word traveled fast at school on Monday. Emma Jakowski had actually captured him. He was being held in her dad's tool shed. Anyone who wanted to see him had to be in the Jakowski's backyard by 3:15 that afternoon, chocolate bunny ears in hand. It was no…

Their Nipples

19711971 views00 comments11 fav

The soft twin winds of peace and harmony flow through your nipples It is not milk that gives such flow but the whiff of life’s spirit, the wind of poetry the renewal and the silence of the love you give me I suck like a new

Cousin (from The New Yorker)

19711971 views22 comments00 favs

...to know something people around you don’t know can put you outside of them. And then you can’t get back in...

Kurosawa's Rain

19711971 views22 comments22 favs

The rain fell from the roof. It fell from my voice and and my eyes. Toshiro's Kukichiro stomped gutshot through the mud with his katana. Young and beautiful, Mifumi died there on the screen though he doesn't really die for fifty or more years, they think from something…

Trapeze Artist

19701970 views1515 comments1313 favs

Solitude is such an excellent alternative to suicide.