Most read stories

Blind

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My mother saw the Devil everywhere, even in my dance teacher, with his black leotards and chest hair like bean sprouts. "You're flamingos," he'd say in class when we balanced on one foot; when we lept into the air, "Now you're panthers!" I pictured him in a dark robe,…

Cell Phone

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Hey, how are you? she squeaked.

Predator

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Uncounted hens and piglets/ die at my demand. The killing floor// runs red for me. I am/ monstrous to creatures small and great,

A Small Life in Slices

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It’s Sunday- no need to shave-/ but shave, I do. A little act// of discipline in the discipline/ of routine.

Reproductive Disneyland

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Justin comes out of the bathroom, finally erect, his hands glistening with K-Y jelly as he chucks the girlie mag into a corner. “I'm ready.” Through the afternoon's soft-filtered light, Kelly watches him climb on top of her and thinks of…

lent (valentine's day challenge )

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the names / she carried (within)

The Great San Francisco Poetry Wars, 14

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I only knew that my heart was not in my life as I was presently living it. I needed the breasts of my Helen in my mouth forever, or I was going to die. Die! Ah, the life of a poet! I couldn’t go on living like this. Why should I go on living like this?

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.

Crescent City, Spring '97

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It takes almost an hour before I drift to sleep on the bus. When I wake up in Crescent City, I’m surprised. Maybe I was going somewhere else in my sleep. Walking out of the station, it feels like a strange place. Somewhere I’ve never been before. The

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

Three Micros

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The earth moves.

blanck (1?)

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

Penny cosmogony

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On his knees he divinates diverging lines with belly laughs he levitates the rebel spheres into geodes .

Assiduity Twenty Two

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Warning: reader beware, there's sex in the air.

Gertrude

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When we were young and small we played in the orchard. Mom made apple pies and fried apples, caramel apples and apple sauce, apple cider. Grandma’s apple butter recipe.

Texas Weather

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

Black Eyes, Blue Tears, and Dark Thoughts

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At five a family relative took my life away from me and no one cared

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.

Curry

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I looked around in my pantry but there were no sentences I felt like cooking.

LATE NIGHT WITH MANDELBROT

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On Soapography, two actresses are discussing everyone’s personal heaven, and in another room you can hear a woman who is your dead mother combing her hair in a doctor’s smock in a dream,

bird

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Your mother is a great and dying bird. Once, she tended her grand feathered nest. Once, she preened.

My dark job history

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Sometime in the late 60s when I was thirteen I had this paper route for the San Mateo Times.

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.

Full

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The trash is full. Again. I open the bathroom trash—because the diaper genie is stuffed—but there’s no room. I try the kitchen next. The lid swings open, catapulting carrot shavings onto the floor. I lay the diaper on the counter for later.

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.

Dead End

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She'd still rest her fingers on your back, and her smile still lit the lantern of your soul.

Nothing to laugh at, at all.

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The house had to be clean - I mean thorough-clean - when he got home from the pit for his tea, or he’d throw his plate at the wall and the gravy would run down onto the carpet. There was always gravy.

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.

Raw Sugar

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Take shelter from the rain inside the Museum of Sex.

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 . . .