Most read stories

AK (excerpt)

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They said AK, AK, if you want to come here, if you want to come to Antioch, you have to bring your A+ game. If you want to run with the big boys. That’s what they said. So I brought my A+ game.

On a bridge in Regensburg

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To hear my name, called out across the Roman stones on a bridge in Regensburg through the languid March drizzle, was to breathe again as my head burst through the water.

In tidal relief

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the world slips under the waves

Bare Feet

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Bare feet on hardwood floor Twists into circles

::HARD (excerpt)

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It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t scary. It wasn’t great. And it never is with people. Except..eventually..when you meet the right person..it is.

The Lost Meaning

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of any cautionary tale is somewhere found rolling around in your own sweet voice for me. Your sound's still listing there inside my wobbly head. My head is too often in my open hands, grinning behind its face-mask like a parade on…

I Can Take Satan

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It was all I was convinced / in designing the encounter.

Not Lao-tzu's Magna Carta, xxxviii - xlv

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what is raised up must rest on its foundation.

Lockdown

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I'm explicating Emily Dickinson when the alarm starts: three long, two short. Lockdown mode. Only there was nothing in the staff bulletin about a drill. So I tell the students to get down on the floor, away from the window. I open the classroom door and lock it from…

Ghost Searches Downtown

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No one told a story.

Love Meal #3009

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His knife enters the Maui onion. He minces garlic and applies heat to pan and melts sweet cream butter and browns the garlic first and then he adds the onion and more heat, but it's time that will surely caramelize them. Salt and pepper and splashes of wine for the pan and…

Turkey Hunt

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While I was still new at Black & Twigg, shortly before Thanksgiving, Percy brought me a handwritten memo to type, the subject “Turkey Hunt,” addressed to all Black & Twigg employees in the San Francisco office from management. It said that the firm…

Piggy Bank

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He shivered in his robe and pajama pants as the showdown with the piggy bank continued on this dark winter’s night. He couldn’t resist the cute dots for eyes, the stubby legs and perked up ears.

Erased

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You took up residence on the dark side of things, a bolthole in a wind-flayed right angle of a tower block where pigeons and suicides tumbled blackly on the air currents. You set about drifting off from who you were on a tide of cheap whisky and bad poetry, graduating…

A Fib

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We want our lives even-cut, …

Uncle Moscow

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He asked me to bury him in Vegas. Instead, I had him cremated in Trenton.

'So I fucked Beavis ... so WHAT??'

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[CAUTION: "DISINTEGRATION OF THE FUNCTIONING PSYCHE," IS, APPARENTLY, A "DEEPLY PERSONAL" EXPERIENCE!"]

Safe

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He is drilling the door of a safe to access the keys he locked inside.

Down to Earth

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He ran his forefinger round the rim of the lid then sucked at his fingertip. The texture's like chalk, he thought, it tastes of earth. He hadn't anticipated this — but dipped his finger in again and swallowed. It was like scraping his tongue against a blackboard on…

THUNDER

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not the sky

Mystery

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In a corner of a neighbor’s land too stony to till Cob makes a mystery.

Getting Sideways On Douglas

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Under the dirty orange glow of sodium streetlights, the glistening pavement looks slick, but it’s only just wet. The mid-November temperature is cool—quite mild, actually, for this late time of year—still hovering in the upper 30s—so far posing only the

The Great San Francisco Poetry Wars, 7

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Warren Jeffries had called me on the phone the night before and said, “Listen to this,” as he held the receiver out his bedroom window at the noise coming from the riot on campus. They were spraying gas over People’s Park, trying to get them to disp

Jesus, Zombie

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"Jesus was a zombie?" I ask, shocked.

the wicked daughter

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The air has its dark confessional, and I have mine. Hot is called raw by some, hate mixed with malice for others. I am only separated by this dark window of time from you, but you never feared the lovely or the lonely.

like a child

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where is the magic at? the spit the dirt or the words?

A Gardener in February Thinks About June

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I want to be that daring gardener who ploughs up her front yard -- to the horror of the Neighborhood Association.

You Atop Franz Josef Glacier, Twelve Miles From the Tasman Sea

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58 words

None But The Righteous

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Susan was twenty-four when it happened again, but she had neither the patience nor the attachment to see it through.

A Rich Future

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Also in development,/ the anatomically perfect robot/ pool boy and naughty maid,