Most read stories

Fascination

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Lying all over itself...

DANCING ON AIR

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You were at a saloon on Water Street. Witnesses say. You were taken out of the place and put on a sloop against your will. Witnesses don’t say.

Knell Quarternion

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The Jester sat down on the edge of his mattress. He laboured to bring one gout ridden leg up to lay across the other. The jingle bell at the tip of his pointed toe mocked each serrated movement of his limb with a jaunty tinkle. He grabbed his ankle to arrest its…

News That Stays News

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Some trick of the morning light makes the tattoo on her ankle look like the burn from a branding iron. She had watched her father as he slept last night. He was handsome and innocent, like a baby boy.

Emotional Gentrification - excerpt Single Stroke Seven

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Sunday, Nolan and I drop by the ice rink on 10th and Alma to watch the amateur hockey leagues battle it out in an unspoken yet assumed class war: the buff, unemployed rink bums who can grind ice, cross-check, and stick handle like the pros, versus the dou

The Great San Francisco Poetry Wars, 3

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That put a real crimp in our already crimped sex life. Actually I didn’t mind as much as Allison minded. It made her real grumpy when she didn’t get laid. I could never understand how she could bear so much pain, because she was so small that it was l

Running

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On the way home, “Friendly honk,” he said.

A Tale Of Three Titties

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"Someone should have told her that less is more..."

On Being Bald....

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Hair today...gone tomorrow The sun beats down on my balding crown.

RT @dadaism #amwriting

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How much do book editors earn? Peacock Love. (aww…)

Eve

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When God blessed creation, a ewe gave birth to Adam. When he cursed Satan, Eve hatched from a crocodile's egg.——In naming the animals, Adam marked them for death. His own name was a slow fire. Eve's was an inferno.——In the shelter of the Tree of…

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.

At Night in the Field

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“Ol’ Betty has a nice set of headlights,” he says with a wink as he springs out of the recliner.

Seascape

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They had been wintering on the Cape under gunmetal skies...

Adultery and Africa

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“What would you think if I committed adultery?” She pauses very briefly before replying. “What, you got time on your hands?”

How To Write Funny

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I've never really been impressed with authors that write long teary-eyed novels about people dying of terrible diseases or uplifting stories about the armless boy who made the wrestling team.

Dancing Beneath a Gazebo

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We learned to dance beneath a gazebo / in Spring Lake Park / We were fourteen

The Little Things (three versions)

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It's the little things that trip us up: a small hole in a level field, an innocuous root in a well-trod path, a disinclined sidewalk...

The Photo of the Bulletproof Man

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He was corporate then, young, his wife gorgeous, the collar flipped up on his twill overcoat, a lit cigarette in one hand, the other around his wife’s waist. They stood outside. It looked chilly. She wore a hat. He looked bulletproof.

Octopus

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My ride, my good friend Morning was due any minute, but of course, he/she was always late. My costume was a dog. I was stuck to another dog, in the act of passion. A stuffed one. A basset hound. I said my name was Lightning.

Her Hair, a Braid

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She’s there, in a tin, loosely wound beneath sepia tissue paper, a braid to worry in your fingers.

Language

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this reaching, this striving to love like it's there becoming something we need.

The Man Who Couldn't Move

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Without warning his eyes expertly navigated into a closed position setting off the dream machine long without power until this very second.

Heat

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It was so hot we walked out on our husbands. There were reasons, we supposed. They left the refrigerator doors open all day, grabbing beers when they passed by, tossing the sticky caps upon counters. They drove their Metropolitans to buy food, leaving th

The Plunderer

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Bill (Gunnery Captain of the Left Hand Gun, HMM Plunderer), while not exactly obese, nor could a disinterested observer call him him rotund, was nevertheless the sort of man who'd never be caught by a famine unprepared. And because of this more than regulation…

To See Who's There

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To See Who's There Able these days to search through centuries, I click, scribble, cut and paste, skim, reject, record, resurrect a wet stone wall, the smell of burning peat. Bob's your uncle, Peggy's …

Meander

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Things are a little out of hand. Information fills room after room after room. I have no bloody idea where I am. I have your photo, but the navigational coordinates are difficult to interpret. Where the hell are you, anyway? I don't like mazes — too much like…

The Red Suitcase: Part 1

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He had become an accessory to a murder.

Annals of the Naked Rowdies #78

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A true Rowdies fan begins every conversation about the band with a legend. She would be impressed if he knew the story.

Local Man Makes Good

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A junkyard Bison seems an odd choice over the usual dog, but it did the job--trampling trespassers, vagrants and unautorized salvagers with a violent and admirable efficiency