Most read stories

One Regrettable Talent for Tragedy

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Vandalina embarked on her career of serious dramatic roles to widespread acclaim, her depth of feeling and potency of delivery winning her thunderous ovations and gushing reviews . . .

Smart Bar

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Everything is painted black that isn’t glass, velvet, neon, or chrome. The club is cold, and the DJ who broke-up with me while I forgot I was stoned is spinning his favorites to an empty floor. Endings have a rhythm. I heard this one coming. I can hear it

When I'm Sixty-Four (Semantic Satiation)

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Every day is exactly the same.

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.”

Water, Water Everywhere

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Later I asked Mark if he wanted to watch, but his wife wouldn’t let him. She didn’t like kinky stuff, she said.

Space, Blank, Uninterrupted

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Space, blank, uninterrupted, but then a fissure, a crack, a corridor, and down it you're walking.

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 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…

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.

Lule of Raw - 3

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"I'll tell you one thing I don't want to see, armed confrontation, leading to domestic warfare."

Do the Funky Penguin--With T.S. Eliot

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True story: T.S. Eliot introduced Virginia Woolf to new dance steps including the Grizzly Bear and the Chicken Strut.

Verboten

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

Paul Gauguin: Annah la Javanaise

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It's the outrage of the red monkey at her feet, And the nude thirteen-year-old woman sitting upright In the blue velvet chair, and the hints of blue at her navel, And at her lips and belly and crotch, that so upset Paris. Gauguin had his nerve

The Galleries

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We invent our beauties// as we find them and engineer/ our horrors

Crackle

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As he brushes his shoulders against other people's shoulders until he almost has no shoulders –

A Little Bit of Syrup

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

The Cicada's Cry

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In the cicada's cry No sign can foretell How soon it must dieBasho "Hear the locusts?" The woman lifts the child's head. "Hear em, baby?" The child looks blankly in the…

The Rhythm of the Cows

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A cow wanders onto a roof and falls through the skylight. It's a calamity, but such an innocent mistake. Mightn't you amble onto a rooftop once upon a full winter snow in Vermont?Another cow climbs a gravel mound in…

Scene from the Clinic

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No way to know why she's here, but scars and scabs can hold more information than a file or chart.

Beamers

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I try again. "You can make a big cup by putting your hands and fingers together, see?" He glares at me. "A giant could make a big cup," he says. "A giant could make a giant cup." I thought so before, and I’ll say it again. A little genius.

Frozen Bird Pie

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I like how you completely disappeared inside a undetermined and yet planned point of pretty good view, like a rabbit with a gold chained pocket watch, like a stunned, frozen bird with a still burning bullet in its tinyfeathered brain. You could…

Searching for a poem

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Each person in each car could be poetic/ Duende, but they look at each other and ask/“Did you fart?”

Edward Ogle the Third

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Assimilated wheat germ integrated ant worm the capital of brazil.

Noodles

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It's Granny hauling her crooked soul into heaven. Guess who I stole that image from?

Heather.

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

Pharaoh

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Altodog was dressed in filthy chef’s trousers and a long-sleeved purple dress shirt, somewhat dignified by a tattered black vest.

The Nightly Dance

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The electricity animates my body into myclonic dance. I do not rest. I dance with the demons; I dance with Nijinsky rage. I dance with the fury of Saint Vitus and his wooden cross. My shoes are fashioned with my own fear, tanned and stretched over my feet

Daddy, Can I Have A Puppy?

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Dad must have walked around with me 20 times, the store closed around us and finally he said I could have one. They were all in different poses and sizes, with black spots. Except one. One had silver spots.

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 …

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