Most read stories

The Great San Francisco Poetry Wars, 2

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A large crowd of students began to gather around the base of the building that housed the administrative offices, where my hearing was being held. The meeting room was up on the second floor.

Learning to Love Your Permanent Stillness

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["GET UP, GET GET, GET DOWN ... 9-11'S A JOKE IN *your* TOWN!"]

Bukowski

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that guy/ MOSTLY understood / endings

Notes Via The Coffee Shop

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Biscuits and gravy. I'm off today, I'm lazy.

Mall Flower

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I’ve blown out my shag haircut and it’s big. BIG-big.

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.

empty

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feeling empty as the bottom of a bottle dry as a bone in death valley alone

Three as She Lay Sleeping

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As I watched her sleep, I saw gentle frost and sun on crystal.

Tia Alvarez

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Penny followed the woman into the warm, dark interior of her home, which smelled strongly of cumin and other familiar spices she couldn’t name. Penny noted that the tia’s hair had turned almost completely white and had grown very long since Penny had last

Ghosts

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...ghosts still resentful, ghosts far from home...

The Lot

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The inhabitants of the surrounding neighborhood steered clear of the Lot, mindful of its existence, its countless drags of scrap, drenched with the fused association of many scenes and emotions from memory and experience. Left to its own devices, the place is now…

Volume

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Something reached into Avi and took his voice, turning his volume to zero.... A short story of one day. A man going to work, a little magic, a car crash, and a wedding.

What We Give

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Oh, what jealousy does to us! What love does to the living!

The Animal Cracker Incident (Part 2)

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“I feel like my bones are melting.” Her arms are wrapped around her body tightly, like she’s trying to hold herself together. She’s shaking; I can hear it with every breath she takes.

Snatch XIII

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Yet...

Family Circle

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the far-flung Turner boys and their broods descended upon Pemberton like locusts

Birthday Music

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It’s been stored away in the cedar chest since my mother put it there in the early 60’s, well, 1962 to be exact. She was a careful woman, but over these many years the bow has flattened, and the wind-up parts have corroded some from non-use. Oh, the

Dream Eater

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I began to feed him. All the things I could think of - horror movies, cheese, salt, pickles, chilli. Vitamin B6 tablets washed down with warm milk. Anything I could do to grow little nightmares for my new pet.

Begettings

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However did we make it this far/ without murdering one another as the other sleeps

Unfinished Business

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you are the most uptight pansy I have ever met

The Seer

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The strange bones of language wander the room.

Rwanda Suite: Ape Woman

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I should have buried him on the saddleback and kept my mouth shut. I'll murder the bastard who did it.

The First Day

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One sentence

September 1969

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Lake Berryessa, CALIFORNIA It was dusk on the 27th of September when the Stocky Man finished his work and trudged casually back across the…

Mice and Men

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Some life in Rosco's walls. He listened with his dead wife Sonya's stethoscope: rustles and scratching, a collective heartbeat.“Vermin”, said Vlad, Rosco's neighbor. “Will take over if no kill.” He smiled with one tooth, urped some vodka. “I…

Old or Fat

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Which is worse?

Oblique in an Acute New Century

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It is a small life, circumscribed/ by debt and income, age and infirmity./ The Hidden Hand thrusts its middle finger/ high.

Beyond Penderecki

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From a window, the young Pole Krzysztof Penderecki saw resistance fighters hanged by Nazis...

Run For Your Life

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It was where the “Suits” worked. I didn’t want to go there, I didn’t want to be there, but in those days one did what one was supposed to do.

Anxieties of Absence

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On beach trips with our families, there were bumper cars, jet skis; flash enjoyments, beach-themed distractions.