Most read stories

If Wishes Were Horses Beggars Would Ride

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Two people are talking. They are both wearing hats.

First

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“I can’t believe you went ahead and got pregnant without me,” I said.

Letters from the Asylum (3)

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She stepped into a pair of high heeled slippers and began to dance. She was Salome, a witch, dancing like the most beautiful, the most skilled whores of Paris.

Spinning Walt Whitman

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In San Francisco, there rides at night a phantom streetcar whose driver is none other than Walt Whitman . . .

Actual Reality

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Travel into the beautiful swirling being you occupy whenever you get the chance. It's your right to seek the name of the most holy one in your deepest awakening. Then will you most likely find fellow travelers splashing about in their naked auras in…

Jorge Curioso Flies a Plane

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This is Jorge. He was a good little monkey. And always curious.Like the time he and his friend, the man in the amarillo sombrero, had to fly to Japan. *Jorge sat by the window. Watched the ground get further away. Until they were above the clouds. He looked out…

The Future and Why We are Afraid

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Once, when I had not talked to you in a long time, I woke with your name in my mouth.

Bonne Fire

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And the voodoo pins pinged as, folding and imploding, she was reduced to a petro-chemical puddle.

Outfit

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Momma called them Vaughens, "a outfit," and said, "they shoulda throwed the book at that Darla Jean."

Audition

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My piano tutor, a walnut-faced shrew, rapped my knuckles with her small plastic baton to smack them back into the proper tempo, an adagio I’d mastered weeks before. One hour until the audition and damn if this woman didn’t break the skin of two of my fing

Criticism of the Dead

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The wind has no voice and yet we listen, perhaps imagining the ramblings of a mad man

Girls with Guns

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"My dear man. We are not friends we are symbiotic."

Fair-Weather Best Friends Forever

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“How scared?” Mikey said, not wanting to find out, and already looking pretty nervous.

Rainbow

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“What I really want to know is, why is a straight guy called Caspar opening a lesbian leather bar in Berlin anyway?” Shona asked. “Schöneberg must really be going to the dogs.”

Litter Box

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When I died, she said, she was going to have me cremated and put my ashes in the cats’ litter box.

laundry

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She’d once read the Time-Life Encyclopedia on The Universe and became obsessed with the woman from Alabama who was singled out, by a rock from a far place, in her sleep.

Raincoat

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“It’s about basic working conditions!” she says, rubbing ice cubes on her nipples.

The Haunting

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the ugliness will not be denied

Weary

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At this time of night, the fluorescence makes his eyes bleed. The muscles in his legs are tight; walking's more of a necessity than anything else. Alexander pushes the shopping cart down the endless gray tile floors of the Grand Union on 35.

love poem for the homeless man who was killed on wednesday night

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it was your hands—caked with years-old clay & quaking from too much solitude

Fuck Ups

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we try, we keep trying

What She Thought It Was

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She refuses to let her eyes cry. Her eyes played tricks on her and showed her one thing was really another. They don't deserve to cry.

X Marks the Spot

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I was an only child....

Grand Union

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She suggested just moving in together. A lot less constrained by convention she, on occasion, did not wear a bra.

Quitting

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

The Dog

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They stood at the intersection waiting for the light to change so they could cross the highway.

Inventing Games

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As children we invent games and we're really creative. We concoct ridiculous rules and enjoy making adaptations to them. And everything makes sense. Then you grow up, lose creativity. You don't invent games anymore. Recess is replaced with a second…

Things That Glow

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The tiny green light flashing in the lawn of an apartment building one night that caught Roberta’s attention while we were walking home from Café Vita.

The Great San Francisco Poetry Wars, 15

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Steve Bancroft’s future wife showed up at his door that same night, slamming her hand loudly against the door and shouting for him. “Steve, Steve, wake up. Damn it, come on. You forgot to pick me up at the airport. Who are you in there with? I said wa

Strip (Her)

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There’s not enough cigarette cloud to conceal her, malnourished and pale beneath blue and pink lights that summon 80s-era skate rinks. She saunters towards the center of the stage, asking her bored expression to convey detachment, while a DJ that fits the