Most read stories

Park Bench

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Then daylight's lovely lantern/ Dressed in yellow white/ cleanness/ Danced a ballet towards/ Her majesty’s park bench/ She did! She sat on you!

PORNOGRAPHY

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PORNOGRAPHY First He went across the floor to where she sat. One sleeve of her shirt dropped to show her shoulder, salted and brown. One hundred fish filled the wave. Now, he said. Now is now. Second The car wouldn't…

Welcome to the Dark Walls

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“No one ever notices everything: but sometimes it happens, when no one is noticing everything, everyone misses the same thing in the same moment . . ."

Pumpkin Patch

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Artie invited me to go with him to pick out a Halloween Pumpkin for the house. I had recently moved into a communal living situation and we were still getting to know each other. Artie was the kind of person who made a special occasion out of ordinary life. Why…

All Dogs Are Needy

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I know she's a dog person, as she owns one. “No, my asshole ex-boyfriend wanted one and then he left me with it.” she admits, then adds, “I don't even like dogs. All dogs are needy.”

Laughing and Looking for Love

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"Think of every sexual partner you've ever had. I'm nothing like them. Unless you've ever slept with a bulimic German cellist called Elsa."

Rough Draft

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fated and cruel, a person I don't love

The Birth of Girma Dali

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Amid the swerve and pulse of hungry bodies Girma Dali picks his spot, a tissue-wide patch of net where's he going to strike. A green-jerseyed defender closes in on him his brute momentum unleashed like a kamikaze pilot swooping into enemy orbit, his lunging body makes…

A Chaos Theory

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—with spinster goddesses in the middle of things / circling looms.

"Hadrian's Farewell" as Tanka and Haiku

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Little rambling soul,/kind guest, friend: leave me laughing,/pallid stiff, and bare.

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

Is That You, Bugs?

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Poor kid. She didn't mean to leave my business card on her kitchen counter next to the telephone. It was a mistake.

Rear View

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The man of a thousand faces was defunct.

We Don't Need a Guitar Man

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The courtroom smelled a lot like mold and it was hot as you could imagine. I sweated through my shirt and wondered if he wasn’t dying under his robe. He looked down at me from his bench and I just knew he was going to call me a commie and sentence me to l

What Gorillas 'Talk' About When Gorillas 'Talk' About Love

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Eons later, Bobo evolves into Shakespeare. Bonus feature: wings.

Lines with Billie Holiday

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It is almost as if there isn’t a wedge of wood between us – I can feel him inches away from me. I can’t control the sigh or the tears that escape my body.

Bon Bons

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love notes yellowed through the years

The Great San Francisco Poetry Wars, 5

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and we got the apartment, which was on a street that backed up on an alley situated, as it turned out, right across the alley from the very first Hari Krishna house, where they would wake up at four every morning and begin their maddening chanting: Hari K

The Haunting

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the ugliness will not be denied

Ladies' Day At Sam's Place

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I'm warming my stool at the far end of the bar as usual, nursing my fourth draft on a balmy Wednesday afternoon when I lock eyes with this lady who's bashing her head through the front door. You've heard the expression, “50-yard fox,” right? —Looks…

Hurricane Shutters

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The thing that really gets you about the house is the hurricane shutters. They're up already, even though it's the end of May, because Buck's uncle is back in Rhode Island for the summer and he's prepped the house on Key Largo like Armageddon is coming.

Sparrow and Mockingbird Greet the Dawn

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feathered waves of tangerine peach

soft soap

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you were very very small, you were everso small, you were like – the tiniest creature, hopping about on one leg

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

The Madness of the Gods

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“Have you heard about Lucius?” The lawyer turned to the carpenter. “They say he's gone mad. Just gone; the madness of the gods.” Sitting in the barbershop were the former two, one in his forties and the other of his fifties; a gray-haired…

My Morning Song is Better than Yours

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And I just want to say that my morning song is better than yours. I want you to hear it buzzing in me like an old radiator. I want you to do what you’ve done before. To press your ear against the skin and listen for the static.

Obituary

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I won't fail at this like trying to fix a leaking sink without mud grease or washers tinier than Cheerios.

Insurgencies

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The end will film itself/ in charred, eviscerated bodies

just like James Taylor

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tell me about the time you lived in Carolina, and what my smile does for you.

Clicking

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Reining her small hands around the molded handle grips, her bottom bouncing athwart and wildly off the seat, Symphony wrenches her center of gravity inward, commandeering as much control from the road it would allow. With her breaks behaving as stubborn