Most read stories

Godfrey part 2: Marjory's bag

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"when I say bag, what I mean to say is…"

The Rising Tide

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I'm just a rental dog myself looking for the guardian of starlight peeing on the expired parking meters and barking up all the wrong trees.

Old Egg

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He must have been pleased with his composition, as he repeated and repeated and repeated it. Paul joined in the song. Then the children at neighboring tables joined too, until the song rose into a dining hall chorus.

Moon Over the Downs - excerpt

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Each drip off the corrugated plastic sheeting made a tinny sound that he could hear from deep within the damp sleeping bag and layers of blankets where he was trying to sleep.

We call them the Removal Men

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They came early and parked up, under cover of the night and the giant oak. I only know this because people told me afterwards. Watching us, they were. It was six o'clock before they smashed their way in, scaring the three of us out of our wits. Baby Billy screamed the place…

The Shadow

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"Did I have a dream, or did the dream have me?" - Rush, "Nocturne"

Waiting for the Voice on the Line

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hoping for a happy outcome/ like a kindly voice on the line

the swan drives a car

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the swan drives a car ( window down; wing half hanging out ) …

A Brief, Protracted Reflection

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...Loves and fights and retires; / And dies.

The French Revolution

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Judith was a bed wetter. Judith was a first-year college student and she was embarrassed that she wet the bed.

Stillness

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You were sitting on dark leather meringue, wearing slit ivy, epilated thighs sliding through, roots showing beneath your anaemic skin, fighting with the pale bluegreen of your veins. Quills extended from your left hand, bent about 10.2 degrees or so.

Read Me

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I won’t be eating much anyway if someone doesn’t start reading me. I’ve got to get a hook so people will be drawn to my work. I’ve got a few concepts I’d like to share with you. See what you think.

Texas Weather

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I know this: the sky is vast here// and the sun unforgiving/ to any architecture not the best

Poems I Wish I Had Written

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Parsimony, Sage Advice, Alimony, and Time. That would be one. The Waste Land. The Hollow Men. The Red Wheelbarrow. There are others, But I have definite shoe anxiety dreams and can’t get over them. Do not Go Gently Into That Good Night. Alone

Zeus Takes a Day Job

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That's demeaning enough, but not as hard to take as the customers. They're all jaded hipsters, thumb diddling smartphone freaks, pretending their online interactions actually count as relationships and that “tweets” are real conversations. It's sad, reall

You Can Go Now

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The summer when I was six and my sister Audrey was eight, she'd walk around our house pretending to be in a trance, fingers strategically hovering over my mother's vases and lamps, leaving smudges behind on my father's heavy oak desk and rocking chair. She'd lumber past my…

The Yellow Room

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...the knives she laid out on the porch before her husband left her, washed and dried, set neatly by copper pennies.

Confederates

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I knew I spoke out of turn when I asked my father's old friend Charlie Jobe what he thought would come of moving to the veterans' camp, or "Village of the Deranged", as the newspaper has since taken to calling it. That was their description after all the

the cold the day left

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in our teens as tough as the cold/we wore denim and flannel with our boots/kicking at whichever wind blew . . .

Light Eyes

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Once, when he had been married for a year, she sent him a card which said, "If you have seen a cat smoke a pipe, you have got it made." There was an illustration of a big, black panther, standing up on its hind legs, smoking what looked like a big tub of

Words of Departure

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Not a fuss, not a stink, The eulogy, deep, will make one think, Grandmother, sat in back, will wink

River Run

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yearning amid the waning

blanck (1?)

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① / empty space / not black / not white / not noise / blanck

Pretending Veracity, History Winks

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Mosaics are a trick of the eye, seeming

Fertile Ground

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Miriam forced herself to focus on the kitchen door and on putting one foot in front of the other. “Is everything alright?” she heard Ada ask the family. “Of course, everything is fine,” the woman said. “What could be wrong other than the impossible serv

Happy Birthday... Mr. President

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Her dress swirled around her as she stepped into the ballroom, looking every bit as sultry as her recent Playboy cover...

Rowdy

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Flash’s hackles stood brushlike but he kept his head bowed just enough beneath the bigger dog’s stare to delay the inevitable fight. Flash, Mal thought approvingly, would pick the time and place.

Black Bombers

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The missions never change:/ To plant a bed of fast-blooming/ Flowers of annihilation/ Across an unspecific plain.

A Christmas Story

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Two days before Christmas 1946, my mother put me on an Illinois Central railroad train at the whistle stop of Neoga, Illinois.

Small Budget Poems

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Toxins make a body happy/ as if acceleration toward// an end of consciousness/ is its own reward.