Most read stories

At the Number Party

18061806 views1515 comments1212 favs

and dreamed itself infinite.

Verboten

18061806 views77 comments11 fav

Scales were installed on station platforms. Those who were overweight were turned away

If we thought that love was gone

18061806 views66 comments22 favs

If we thought that love was gone that out of sweetness none remained

The Lake

18051805 views55 comments44 favs

The Lake I. When the weather was nice, the fisherman and his girl spread a blanket over the shore's rough sand and watched the cargo ships cleave their way to the…

Three Degrees of Separation from the Same Thing We Were Still Supposed to be Thinking About

18051805 views33 comments22 favs

It was hard to believe that, even very recently, there had been first days of school where nothing happened.

Building

18051805 views66 comments22 favs

he told me to be careful,my feet may bleedI watched him walk up and down the path,occasionally bendingwhy?carpenter nails, pieces of broken shinglesall along the pathnow I know why

Fin

18051805 views77 comments11 fav

She doesn’t answer. Ten minutes slide by unmolested in the anesthesia of cheap wine and resignation, the bouncers blurring and unblurring, the room dimming, quieting, the kaleidoscope of sundown giving way to the gentle sadness of candlelight.

-And Lurking Behind Quasar 3C295 . . .

18051805 views22 comments22 favs

“Let’s see that great big telescope of yours,” she exhaled hotly, “I want to grind your lenses!” The doctoral candidate dutifully stood between her and his massive telescope so her hands would encounter some instrumentation with no optical components.

Writing Coach Helps Blocked Women Tap Inner Meanness

18051805 views88 comments77 favs

“Susan,” he says menacingly, as if he’s a husband who’s caught a cheating wife in a discreet liaison with another man. “I thought I made myself clear about this sort of thing.”

Wrong Number

18051805 views99 comments22 favs

"...just like you rehearsed..."

Slaloming the Siphoners

18051805 views33 comments11 fav

Hipster-neutral dressed simulacra-person offers a glance and a wave, sudden as a ping-pong serve, designed to crowd your space and "pal" you but I dodge it — I'm practiced at this.

Why Things Are Just OK with Me

18051805 views2929 comments1313 favs

With such demeaning precarity, I can’t read/ anything more than a thousand words

The Moral of This Story Is

18051805 views88 comments77 favs

Always take the train.

Sky Without a Song

18051805 views66 comments66 favs

He hung up and I sang some whiney lyric about wanting him back. You know the songs that say the same shit: I’m an idiot. Love me anyway. I’m Velcro with nothing to stick to and you’re a nappy surface that gives me a reason to exist.

The Death of Childhood Heroes (or "Roadkill")

18041804 views44 comments00 favs

We were pushing ninety down the highway through a stretch of what rightfully should have been called the Badlands. We were both absorbed and coping with the rapidly escalating stages of desperation and so neither of us noticed when the yellow figure stepped…

The Eagle and Her Chicks

18041804 views11 comment00 favs

On the day they were born, the old mother eagle named her chicks Faith, Hope, and Charity.

A Clue Found Aboard a Zen Mind's Floating Iceberg

18041804 views88 comments77 favs

I do so want to bring you into the sacred linguistically eternal loop of all ordinary things on earth, but it can so easily turn into a very sudden unsparing trapdoor, or a hissing angry knot tying up itself into even more tricky sorts …

Paris in the the Spring

18041804 views1616 comments1111 favs

he thought of her / longingly

Young Turks

18041804 views00 comments00 favs

There was a whole group of us Young Turk poets who hung out at the Savoy Tivoli in North Beach. Most of them drove cabs, (whereas I was now working in a damned gas station for Angel, my publisher’s man, who got me a job there.) They would double-park thei

Extra Ticket

18041804 views11 comment11 fav

My best friend died yesterday. His name was Franklin Seever, but we all called him Lin. It started when we were in Little League. There were two Franklins on the team so Coach, who was my dad, called the fat one Frank and my best friend Lin.

Maritzer's Axiom

18041804 views88 comments66 favs

We were just as bourgeois as Bloomingdale’s, one generation past canned ravioli dinners with cheap white bread.

Understudy

18041804 views1212 comments99 favs

All young and loud and big and I swear her face like a lighthouse lamp, glowing—I remember thinking, ‘She’s drunk at nine in the morning.’

Marjan’s Tooth

18041804 views00 comments00 favs

When my feet touched the ground on the tarmac at Bagram I cannot begin to describe the feeling I had. It was as if God had spoken to me directly, whispering in the cold mountain air: “Son of Marjan, I welcome you.” The feeling took hold and overcame m

Heather.

18041804 views00 comments00 favs

Gone Heather, with her hands in her hair, silent for help, over-involved now scared.

Amy-Loyd Plax

18041804 views1212 comments1111 favs

When I no longer know you, what signal will you give to remind me that you and I once loved?

Halfway Out The Door

18031803 views55 comments33 favs

She asks if I only write about men, which I tell her is redundant. I also answer, “Yes, but sometimes I write about them as race cars, hyenas, vaginas, or God.” She smirks like she wants to smile, but it’s stuck halfway out her door. Her happiness has

A Little Bit of Syrup

18031803 views55 comments33 favs

"I made up my mind then, in the backseat, sucking on a cherry Popsicle, that I wanted to be like Ruby’s mother..."

Driving Old

18031803 views1212 comments1111 favs

I drive old now

Human Kind Can’t Bear Very Much Reality

18031803 views1212 comments99 favs

Particles flung by the sun pierce us through, undetected

I used to think the sun was the moon

18031803 views55 comments22 favs

I imagined the sun to be the moon and discovered it was not on a road trip in California where I noticed the sun on one side and the moon on the other.