Most read stories

The Shadow People

16231623 views55 comments11 fav

Two summers later, the ritual began. Carol left her house at midnight, having served her husband and daughter a heavy dinner that left them caged in their sleep. She was like a thief working in reverse: she rose from bed with her husband’s first snore,

Mosaic

16231623 views99 comments77 favs

MOSAIC Your eyes coal-rimmed, busted, burned by betrayal. You and I, knee to knuckle, skinny with disorders and blurred around our edges. Challenged by our experience and the ash of past-love dusting the grate, the state, the…

Picture Window

16231623 views1414 comments1212 favs

You call your wife. “Do you see what I see?” you ask.

Estella

16231623 views99 comments66 favs

Everyone loves a story of love unrequited. But what about the stories of the unrequited lovee?

Valhalla After Dark

16231623 views22 comments00 favs

In traffic I cry bloody murder, but my bloodlust subsides once I'm in Valhalla. Chip Whitehead wants to see me on the 22nd floor before I start my shift. Charlie and the other suits have been looking at me funny since I sent Chip a memo suggesting the recession…

Strings Go

16231623 views55 comments33 favs

This woman is naked to the waist and then nakeder below that.

Mountains

16231623 views33 comments33 favs

A Little Load of Paint

16231623 views66 comments55 favs

Cézanne sags during a moment of paint. There is an umbrella in the room whose surface collects his thoughts. Outside, in the rain, the grass and garden smell strongly of spring. Fruit litters the table. Light through the window writhes in conversation with shape and…

match point

16221622 views33 comments33 favs

two roses her eyes aqua-blue no, blue-green

Geode

16221622 views77 comments44 favs

There is a rock somewhere with the truth of the sky in it, the glitter of otherworldly charms that falsify the ugliness of the literal.

Birth of a Tiger

16221622 views1010 comments55 favs

He was instantly on her, pulling at her nightgown

ID

16221622 views22 comments22 favs

He does not read what he’s giving them permission to do to him, just signs the release.

we're already at the movies

16221622 views66 comments66 favs

israeli flares light gaza/ casting incandescent nudity/ upon jumbled puzzle piece buildings.

I Am Speckles the Clown

16221622 views77 comments44 favs

Food is silly. Eating is silly. Yet the camaraderie of sharing a table is not silly. It is sacred. It becomes silly when the jello arrives.

Six Ways to Say Butterfly

16221622 views22 comments11 fav

He repeated these six words like a prayer. His only confession.

Mississippi

16221622 views88 comments88 favs

“I won't live here,” Beth said, waving her hand to indicate the small Southern town in which they were having dinner—the most delicious fried chicken either of them had ever tasted—in a restaurant located in an antebellum mansion. She looked…

Hide & Seek

16211621 views00 comments00 favs

I have never seen doubt on the face of a Roman general,' he said, ‘but when you looked at me and said “I know”…that was a certainty I'd never encontered. You have crossed the Acheron twice.'

Assiduity Six

16211621 views1212 comments66 favs

"Every generation is a new generation, isn't it? What's so different about your generation?"

Hobby Lobby

16211621 views77 comments66 favs

In human rights, a man and a woman may marry and bring forth a family. It is a civil right in the U.S. but not a human right (as far as I know) to raise a child singly without the knowledge of the other parent.

Seasonal Poem

16211621 views66 comments55 favs

One of the poems in my collection, One Day Tells its Tale to Another, published December 16, 2012. Available on Amazon. My first book!

March

16211621 views2121 comments1111 favs

The lungs forsake their love of breath. The arms/ resist throwing off the small weight of sheets.

A Paper that Changes Things

16211621 views88 comments11 fav

The dowdy woman in fart nailed the vim.

Need and Desire

16211621 views66 comments33 favs

“I mean it, Hanna. I don't want you to.” But his leg felt carved away where her head had lain. One stupid thing jostling another for attention. He was afraid that if she touched him again, he'd have her on the ground.

Beneath the Light of an Exploding City

16211621 views00 comments00 favs

Under the darkness of their new city. The heave and moan of structures as they breathed and pulsed. Under the darkness of this city, under the hum of their florescent bulbs and the tumbling rattle of motorcars, the wheeze of their machines and the clank o

The Kept Man

16211621 views77 comments55 favs

If the Titanic rises from the bottom of the sea, I will meet you on deck, in a deck chair. Fully dressed for a change.

WARNING: I Brake for Plastic Shopping Bags

16211621 views66 comments44 favs

"...innocent butterflies of pollution trapped and entangled,"

Burning Trash

16211621 views22 comments11 fav

Boys start fires all the time— it's a rite of passage— so when your father gives you the task of setting fire to the family's trash, you don't mind, and when the flames ignite inside the old dishwasher he heaved into the woods behind the house, you…

Grunion Fishing

16201620 views77 comments77 favs

As spilled on a sandy Corona del Mar beach/both in moonlight and starlight so lovely/and strangely sad as if receding still

Five Million Yen: Chapter 9

16201620 views22 comments11 fav

Naked Lady? I know that from somewhere. Then he remembered. That's what they called those old 1930's and 40's Conn saxophones, Naked Ladies. How would Smith know that?

Bloodsport

16201620 views11 comment00 favs

At last one of the men on the line bowed his head in a silent prayer for deliverance from what was about to come, then lifted his head and shouted loudly for his fellows to charge.