Most read stories

Carpe Diem

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It's true push often comes to shove

Cymbals

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On stage, students from the junior college join children from the community to speak and sing in American-French accents. They are timid, heart-broken, in love, rebellious, faithful, resigned to their fates—and all in the matter of a few short hours.

SoliTaire

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She couldn’t help but wonder what 93 year-old Sohrabjee looked for in the torn, dusty lithograph of Marilyn in Persia one of the orderlies had stuck to the wall of the corridor outside Jasmine Wing decades ago.

Extra Ticket

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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.

The Room Below

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The closed door swallowed up both voices, and all I could make out afterward were muffled pleas and angry answers that died completely.

A Black Cat

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And then, and then, and then! After all that, this. After all that bullshit with her Dad, the Associate Principal, the idiotic counselor, and that psychotic police officer, after all that, this: a dead black cat. Blocking her path! Right in the middle of the street! …

C.S.I. #14

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I had dreams of being permeated with the heat of Caramelized sisters. A declawed cat kept creeping along my apartment walls.

Building

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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

Writing Coach Helps Blocked Women Tap Inner Meanness

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“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.”

Sing Sorrow Sorrow

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Lean closer, she smiles, smell my perfume let yourself be taken to a wild forest where owls grow and trees fly.

A Handsome Boy Spends a Wednesday

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It distresses me that you will never lust after me / the way you did for that girl / who had her hands around your belt

Creator

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What purpose other than misery/ can cancer serve? And Parkinson's,/ AIDS, and STDs?

3 Poems

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We have always been a trashy species./ We study ourselves by examining/ garbage-- a pile of mussel shells here,

Criminals

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What about the goons? Those criminals thwarted and left for dead in every action movie for the past thirty years. I'm sure at least a dozen survived the slaughters. I'm sure at least one or two came out if it reformed. This one who quit working for Columbian drug smugglers…

Writer's Cough

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Ok, so I’m sitting here trying to write through a frigging cold. And I. . .Oops, . . . . . . wait a sec!. . . I’m stopped, astounded, stunned between coughing my left lung clear over my keyboard and watching it flopping on the back of my desk. . .

Drift

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Dreams & foghorns.

Ophelia

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Her ghost/kept coming back/to Hamlet

The Signal

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I take the plastic off of the last videotape and stick it in the VCR. I make sure the channel is on 6. Still a commercial. I get my notebook, turn it to the next page and write today's date on top. I get ready. I don't really like the back and forth banter the other news…

Internet Hole (an excerpt from Psychopomp)

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Seventeen-year cicadas are the sometimes-singers that surprise spring with the ugliest mouths of all.

At the Number Party

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and dreamed itself infinite.

Tuscaloosa

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a Ferris wheel gently rocks its last riders then dumps them to the ground.

To Know but not Really

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So strange this feelingTo meet someone I've haven't really metTo know someone I don't actually knowTo desire to learn more but sure I never willTo feel connected not knowing what I'm connected toTo read words, thoughts, feel moved by them, but never hear a voice

A Clue Found Aboard a Zen Mind's Floating Iceberg

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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 …

Residual Flashbacks

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Residual flashbacks; just tiny bright lightning bolts that flash in front of my eyes, just like standing watching a soaring bonfire on a cold and frosty November night, pinprick sparks flying up into the endless darkness of the night.

Fin

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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.

Collision

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That black hole isn't really a hole.

Clockwork

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At any moment, she'll come outside to pick up the day’s newspaper. He can see it resting beneath the blooming crape myrtle, its plastic wrapper glistening with dew.

Maritzer's Axiom

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

The Moral of This Story Is

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Always take the train.

entwined

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you and i exist outside of the chaos and noise entwined in eternal embrace