Most read stories

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.

MY WAR

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In May of 1982, my daughter and I planned a trip…

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.

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,

At the Number Party

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and dreamed itself infinite.

The Red Suitcase: (Conclusion)

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—You must be joking, he laughed.

Why Things Are Just OK with Me

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

If we thought that love was gone

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

Slave to the Rhinestone

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He introduced himself as Jimmy Stamps and shook my hand with the confidence of a man who is Microsoft Windows certified. Reeking of vodka and Swisher Sweets he proceeded to expatiate on the virtues of X

The Boss of Bosses

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The one thing my father told me that I want to believe is true . . .

Breathing

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After only a few months’ practice I am able to dive deep within myself. Inhale. A millisecond stop and I am under the surface. I know there is something here within myself – some treasure that I have come to find.

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?”

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.

Creator

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

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

'My Mother Was My Sister' — Rejection Letter to a Young Writer (Memoir)

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When I was 10 or 11, some people thought that my father was my grandfather, that my brother was my father, and that my mother was my sister!

Tuscaloosa

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

Fair-Weather Best Friends Forever

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“How scared?” Mikey said, not wanting to find out, and already looking pretty nervous.

-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.

Lost in Suomi

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Wind pummeled me awake, smelling of pine and some quality of newness I could not identify...

Baking Bread

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the champagne foam cascades like cherry blossom ensnared in the first gales of spring

Paris in the the Spring

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he thought of her / longingly

Drift

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Dreams & foghorns.

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.

Ophelia

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Her ghost/kept coming back/to Hamlet

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.

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.

He Brings Things Closer

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Behind the plastic kitchen, where the special children sometimes sit, a large boy in tight dungarees had grabbed Stephanie's hair in one fist.

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.