Most read stories

The Birth of Girma Dali

17011701 views11 comment11 fav

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…

The Energy of Girls

17011701 views1212 comments77 favs

Emma and I were in a shabby part of town with vacant lots and overgrown yards, and I wondered if something would happen as we loped beside Tom, who was slow-witted and 21. We were 13 . . .

Lost Dream

17011701 views1010 comments55 favs

It’s a song you knew once, begin to remember now: You’ve had this dream before.

Heavenly Blue Morning Glory

17011701 views55 comments11 fav

‘Oh, and try these. ' She handed me a plastic baggy full of seeds that resembled watermelon seeds, only smaller. ‘If these don't work your problem runs deeper...'

Poppa

17011701 views00 comments00 favs

said you loved me told some jokes aren’t you dying?

mnemonic haiku

17011701 views77 comments55 favs

skies electric blue,/limpid dewy air, the world/framed by a small farm.

A Broken Ankle, Canasta, and a Weirdly Sexy Jesus Sighting

17011701 views1010 comments88 favs

nothing can stop a group of genteel Southern women from a card game, and divine intervention makes one's participation in such an event quite worthwhile

COSMOGONY

17011701 views1212 comments1111 favs

I am sitting on our porch in the middle of the night. I can't sleep. The stars look like runway lights. Out of boredom, I reach out my hand to connect the distant dots. The tip of my finger hits…

Brink of Extinction_Chapter One

17001700 views00 comments00 favs

The year is 2110. The earth is no longer habitual for human beings. The oceans are gone, the sky is red and radiated and the last vestiges of human civilian are located within the confines of massive barrier cities. For a century mankind has been at war w

The Spoken World

17001700 views1313 comments33 favs

The spoken world is bigger than I had ever imagined it to be, wonderful and relentless and unforgiving, and to be a part of it was my grandest childhood fantasy. I don’t know what the world sees me as now, but inside I will always be a stutterer.

Oedipus Speaks

17001700 views33 comments11 fav

I don’t know what happened. One day I was in her room, groping the various drawers for hidden condoms, glimpses of women’s undergarments and I found a spectacular pair of blue lace panties

Magnum Opus

17001700 views44 comments33 favs

The scaffolding had been difficult to construct. The rock floor of the bluff offered no purchase, so he'd been forced to anchor braces to the trees behind, then span some thirty feet. A cantilevered gallows reached another fifteen feet past the stage...

THE OPPOSITE OF A GROWTH SPURT

17001700 views1313 comments88 favs

I’m aware I will never be a woman the night you leave me for another city

Made in Japan

17001700 views1717 comments44 favs

It was in the spring of 1958 when I first arrived in Kobe, Japan, traveling aboard a Norwegian merchant ship, looking to make movies on a limited budget. Superior quality cameras, lenses, and film were being produced in Japan at a fraction of the cost for similar products…

The Great San Francisco Poetry Wars, 5

17001700 views11 comment00 favs

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

Duck Sauce

17001700 views22 comments22 favs

In principle, Sergeant Brock Lumley resisted superstition, but if you were to stop him on any given day he was patrolling Baghdad streets with his rifle squad and ask him to open the front left ammo pouch on his flak vest, he’d get this look on his face..

The Rest Nowhere

17001700 views1919 comments1212 favs

A screaming comes across the brain

abalone fishing

17001700 views33 comments00 favs

after several beers this woman told me once/(when I was maybe 15)

Kraków Correspondence

16991699 views44 comments11 fav

The SS and Gestapo began rounding us up, at least those who aren’t registered, those without yellow cards, today. Rumor has it they got at least 1,000 and took them to the camp, to the barracks. I tried not to watch and only listened, only heard some of t

An Old Peach

16991699 views00 comments00 favs

Allen would stroll the remains of the orchard, reminiscing with Tad, flirting with dementia.

yaaaay i got the job at deutsche bank!!!!! 5 people like this.

16991699 views00 comments11 fav

you'll call it jealousy, but i promise youit's really not, because i wouldn't liketo have your life any more than i wouldmine. because really, i lead a life notunlike that of a housecat, knockingaround and getting spooked by closingdoors when i know nobody is in. what…

Taking a Job

16991699 views33 comments22 favs

Teaching never occurred to me in college. I took workshops and wrote often. Friends and classmates, meanwhile, switched from studio majors to Art Education, or from English to Certification. Not me. Teaching high-schoolers would be all wrong. Briefly, I…

Beauty

16991699 views00 comments00 favs

"If only we could all look like that." "Truly lovely … such a perfect face." The gallery was busy that day. But still the man and woman stood.

When Kids Complain

16991699 views1515 comments1111 favs

They say, we have hangnails. I say, I have a bruised leg.

Hysteria

16991699 views1515 comments1010 favs

On the birthday before he started school, he received a pencil case from his paternal grandparents. The violet, oblong pouch contained a pencil and a pencil sharpener in the same color. He didn't remember what had happened with the pencil or the sharpener, but he had…

The Year, In Review

16991699 views33 comments33 favs

And him, now there’s a him. I’d like if he were perfect, but perfect things never are. My daughter says it best, when she contrasts the two of you, “Daddy worked to forget about his problems. When he works, it makes him feel like there is a problem.”

The Sky-What Limit?

16991699 views00 comments00 favs

Lighter-than-air flight was back. The skies of the coast were alight with colorful balloons, dirigibles, and zeppelins tethered to their docking towers along the beach, the huge aircraft bobbing in the breeze up and down the coast for miles,…

Letting Go

16981698 views55 comments44 favs

Jerrod's lips and tongue were like slabs of bologna someone shook in Kirsten’s face as she hit the turn signal. Kirsten was proud of herself. She'd been taking it well and she was pretty sure her real feelings weren’t poking through.

Three Houses Down

16981698 views88 comments33 favs

I walked on hot coals. She got ahead of me. (228 words)

Folded Flower

16981698 views1313 comments66 favs

Attached in the center were the petals of a small flower pressed in wax paper. Uncreased, she read it out loud