Most read stories

My Dad Builds the House

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Before the saw came my fist through the wall. Now I kneel on the crumbled drywall in my son's closet holding a flashlight, peering into the hole at the plumbing parts I'm supposed to replace. On the other side of the wall the bathtub faucet drips. It is my second…

Memorial Day

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War came home tonight. We weep and hug, while he stares over our shoulders, like the statue we'll make of him. We pour a drink for his shaky hands, wheel him past his friends the dead, and lie to each other about other, far off places as if we knew.

Anthony

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ANTHONY I decide after Jill and I have dinner at her flat and smoke an enormous joint that I need to call Tyler, a conversation I'm not particularly looking forward to. I leave and she's not happy, but I tell her I have homework and we kiss a little bit…

On Living in New York City in 2009, After Watching a Documentary on New York City in the Late 1800s

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God's honest truth, I wake up every morning when my clock punches out its dulcet, insistent clangs, a setting called Ultra Zen Up & Out. I brush my teeth with a blue dollar store toothbrush and watch one of the five morning TV shows designed to let me know the weather…

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.’

Sky Without a Song

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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 Dark

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Outlined against the thinly layered darkness of the room, there is a silhouette of a small boy with his feet pulled up to the chin, failing to hold its own against the thousand stares from the deep violating the stillness of his room, their long familiarity with the…

Naming Crayons, or the Edges of Denim

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neon carrots and atomic tangerines

Signs and Wonders

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Bag worms hang in their cloudy white hammocks. This is the month of webs when long-bodied yellow and black spiders sign their autographs.

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…

Self Help For Daydreamers

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I think I’ll get a tattoo. Not just any tattoo, one I’ll regret. I’ll catch people peering at it, trying to interpret the twists and swirls of the black ink on my fair skin.

Someday, Somewhere, waiting for me.

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Out in the open air, the sun's rays washing over the dead, open fields, Nick lay, his back against the wall of the train platform, eyes facing the sky, hands outstretched to the…

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

Debtor's Prison

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You should have marked that territory like a conquistador, mounted him like an equestrian, left no what-ifs in your wake.

wheat field with cypresses. van Gogh

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There’s no sky like that, with twisting clouds shot up into by cypress trees that are so like dark green flames, leaping out of the earth as if a dark green oily pool were on fire underground, and this was all that could escape, was its essence. And a

The Birds

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My wife goes away for a few days to the little town where Hitchcock filmed The Birds.

Cats Do It Doggie Style

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Xao Ping reflexively dug her claws into the plush chenille of the sofa and let out a low yowl. She knew the old lady would be mad if she tore the fabric, but she couldn’t help it.

Then, But Not Now

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The one-legged crow was back in the yard again today, as it was yesterday and may have been before, but yesterday was the first time I noticed it among the murder while using the binoculars that I often use to bring things closer, things like these iridescent and beautiful…

A Lovely Ghost Sings a Haunting Thing at Her Own Reflection

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We've come this far. That's all we know. We've watched others reach their abrupt ends. They've given us this exact moment and we've taken it from them, sometimes without thinking. It's time for the next communication. I know what concern is…

Badface Investigates - Being Naked

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I'm completely naked in an unheated basement, about 40 first year university students, most of them female, are staring at my ridiculous waif-like body.

The Cat was Wrong

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Bitch My brother is the only person who dared to slaughter a bitch and its five puppies. It is sickening to write this story. Sickening to read it. This happened on Sunday night when the muezzin called for the prayer. The puppies were…

A Drowning

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Her time was spent in its usual way, breakfast, pills, organizing and cleaning. It was just hours behind today; hence the late swim. She was proud she did it, that she went outside. She swam, moved herself in the pool, chilly as it was. The pump made a wa

Encore

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...something in her raw vulnerability and daring beauty drove these men wild...

Assemblance

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I assemble myself daily// from the ready-mades/ of a fast talking world,

song of the dog: Degas

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With her head thrown back and mouth open she howls into the dark green night, letting her gloved hands droop like the front paws of a dog. A large orange corsage attached to the bosom of her gown. Around her thick neck, a ribbon of black velvet. Her p

THE RUNAWAY (I)

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Her purse still hangs on the knob by the door, and seeing it is all that keeps Josh from freaking out because he knows she can’t go too far or too long without her purse.

Green Animals

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Tough boys with loose pants come out at this hour; their long chains swing from low pockets, their virile scent bites like steel in the cold night.

Before the Dance

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A woman walked in from the kitchen. She sat next to him as he poured what was left in the whiskey bottle into each glass. “They could’ve given us more time to make a payment,” he said.

Almanac

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I said, “Marcy, Source Almanac is a guide for the Apple.”

For the young couple in the stairwell passed on my way to teaching Medieval World Literature

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I have/been you/years before/of course