Most read stories

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

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?”

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…

At the Number Party

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and dreamed itself infinite.

Crackle

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

Miss Havisham's Fire

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. . . catching her breath somewhere between ecstasy and surprise. . .

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

Drift

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Dreams & foghorns.

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.

Understudy

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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.’

Edward Ogle the Third

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Assimilated wheat germ integrated ant worm the capital of brazil.

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.

Paperclip

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The Americans don't want us. They want knowledge. They want to eat with us. They want technology and weapons. They want the results of research they themselves are too craven to perform, answers to questions they ask themselves in whispers, in the dark. T

-And Lurking Behind Quasar 3C295 . . .

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“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.

Old Penny

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Nothing about it// is attractive- its color, it’s design,/ it’s market value. I leave it be and watch

Faith, Hope, and Charity

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She wears three or four tattered sweaters on cool days. She pushes a basket borrowed from a grocery store. There is a plastic lawn bag in the basket with God knows what inside.

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.

Dear Helen

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I watched you knee deep in water with a little boy you were hitting.

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.

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.

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…

Restland,

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He died a printer finding late/ after so much selling himself selling/ a craft that pleased and paid enough

The Moral of This Story Is

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Always take the train.

Amy-Loyd Plax

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

The Death of Childhood Heroes (or "Roadkill")

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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…

Gregory Dates a Witch

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None of us took it too seriously when Gregory from underwriting said he was dating a real-life witch. Being an underwriter is not as interesting as say being a writer. That's why the greatest underwriter in America, Ajit Jain, gets paid per hour what Jame

The Lake

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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

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

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.