Most read stories

Now

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‘Miguel! A pint of Guinness, please!' I might as well have asked for his mother's immortal soul. A smile as benign as a stiletto. But he served a clean and tidy pint.

Now or Never

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One by one our friends are kicking the bucket. Let's get together. It's now or never, we figure.

CfK

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A sturdy and goatish original by know-nothing punks from the sticks. Who cares if we were puny and smelled like fresh milk? For a few years we played and rocked, even turned the Appalachian soundscape a little brown at the edges. At least at first. Mainly

In the Alley

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as i sink down into the shadows crawling like a worm past cold bricks centuries old in my blood

Adam, Eve and the Indie Author

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In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God. What on Earth does that mean? What the hell? Earth, hell, heaven, they were good concepts. He took a rib out of Adam and began to write with it.

Saturday Housekeeping

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but I pretend again I've kept the prairie/ out, have battled back the smoke and dirt

Fade

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I can take you away, away, away.

Because words are insufficient

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The day you came to the wedding the sky was so, so brightly July./ I saw my face where I left it the last time . . . .

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

Sleepy Time for Jimmy

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Now comfy is as comfy does, but when sleeping strange, please accept a wide range of cradle, crib, cave.

Happy Columbus Day

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Oh to be young and vigorous.

Key West with Poo and Company

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Excerpt from Flamingo …

Help Me Rhonda

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Walking to class, Paula routinely fishes around in her purse to be sure the condom she thinks of as a close friend, even naming it Rhonda, is in there to help her avoid a pregnancy yet, even so, Paula admits that sometimes she daydreams in that boring economics class,…

Gogol vs. Quixote

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“We all come out from Gogol's 'Overcoat'," said Dostoevsky. Well, sometimes, I think otherwise.

Malady

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When the malady struck and the world fell dark at noon, she and I groped the walls and found our front door. Outside, bewildered, we heard the whine of jets in free-fall, explosions in the imagined distance. And we heard a car — or was it a truck that veered…

The Red Slit

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Kitchen. sandwich. wife. daughter.

Appeasement

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No, I’m not at the junior high bus stop. I’m at the dining room table with my parents.

Undercover With the Weird Religious Divorce Rules Unit

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An undercover agent posed as an Orthodox Jewish woman in a sting operation that led to the arrest of two rabbis for kidnapping men who refused to grant divorces to their wives.

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…

Another "Accidental" Tryst

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She smacked his back a couple of times with the flat of her hand

Lizard (Valentine's Day Massacre)

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I travel over your body with small feet, reach your heart.

Gasoline

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Her hair’s the color of LA at night On such occasions when the Santa Anas Have left the hills bone-dry and burning bright

One Last Hurrah, #1

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She was about 35 or so and noticeably pregnant. She was near hysteria when she knocked on our apartment door, right across the street in L.A. from a convent. But she took one last desperate wild look at me, standing at the door. I saw the animal in her ey

A Tall Order

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There was something about her eyes that he couldn't shake. He stood in line, waiting for his chicken finger tenders and one large size 32 oz. cola. No salad (a childhood aversion he had never abandoned), and no mashed potatoes. Friday night and the eve

Rejection at the Gates of Heaven

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"Some Purgatory in order, innit?"

Myra's Mother

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Smoking is like hooking up with an ex-girlfriend: you know she's bad for you and that it won't work out, but it feels so familiar and comfortable and so easy to slide back into.

The Alarm

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Harris Tobiasharristob@gmail.comThe Alarm A terrible clanging in the middle of the night roused me from my bed. I put on some clothes and hurried into the street there to mingle with my bleary eyed neighbors. At first we thought it was a fire but there was…

The Edge of Night

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The night wrapped its arms around us as we drove west, taking the highway past Medford towards Philly. The kids were asleep in the backseat and we were both counting the mile markers, staring out the windows with quiet eyes. I listened to the drone of the…

Failed Restaurants

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Their specialty is the roasted Australian hare, long ears intact, arranged on a bed of sassafras.

May the Glad Inherit

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All creatures know death at their very core, a tacit default--