Most read stories

from Presence

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facts are facets are / things in the act // the truth speaks softly // as time saying amber / to the enduring sap // words come and go / like leaves like men // we the tree remain ...

Waffle House Worker Survives Wild Ride on Car Hood

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After three teens took off without paying and he clung to the hood of their car He wasn’t trying to be a hero sandwich or otherwise but climbed onto the hood when they tried to run him over There was some question and dispute over th

Roses

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Your laugh used to startle the nurses.

Last Words

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I met Barry Hannah once in my life. I’d come to Oxford, MS, to meet an entirely different writer whom I thought then and think now very highly of. I’d also come to escape from another slew of regrets. Oxford is a great city to run away to.

The Concord of This Discord

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-Love is a rushing of blood

Castor and Pollux

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Over the stained fence the spectres flew and that is where the rain was turning colder and colder in the time when the trees had become mostly bare.

The True Price of Bed and a Bath

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So it's me and two other girls...

Parts

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Trigger warning: casualties of war.

Poem to My New Lover, All for Free

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Come, bring your sadness to the precipice of my body, bury it within me like a tool

Please Blow Me.

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[TURN-ONS: willingness. TURN-OFFS: rejection.]

Roadkill

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I It's been there all week, Nose tucked into tail Comfort found between impact and asphalt II I'm still here logged out, still here Had it with the billboards the check engine light milemarkers... Just…

Seasonal Poem

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

The Kept Man

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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.

13 machines from the Bird King's private collection

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1. The sparrows' heads revolve slowly when you press the red button, but the boxing glove attachments don't work.2. A weird weaving of voices, unmusical harmony. One phrase punctures the texture: “The empty slot.”3. Poems are processed into more useful verbal…

Texas Weather Triptych

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I worry for the daffodils/ and there optimistic yellow bursts./ I worry for the over-eager clover,// prodigious green on crepe myrtles,/ even for the early green of nut grass.

The Need To Tell Somebody

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He just had to tell somebody. Anybody. So he called up his publisher, L., who agreed to meet him at Oliveira’s for a drink. It only took about ten minutes to walk there from his big duplex in the Elmwood, where he was still living with his wife among

I Am Speckles the Clown

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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.

Sleep Music, No. 1

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Now they are sleeping in a poppy field, sun-drenched warm afternoon girls lying on their stomachs and sides, faces in flowers, and flowers blowing, blowing. If this afternoon were every afternoon, the world would be cured.

HOUSE OF DREAMS

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Something was changing. We could sense it in the circling air. A loss of stillness - and we'd been still for so long.

My Smelly Valentine

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He asked me if I was going to buy Valentine's for the office this year, and I shook my head. We were in the dollar store, February 13, and I could get a box of twenty kids' Valentines with last year's favourite cartoon…

Final Phases of a Secret Love

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I keep my love for you in me, / like the egg of a worm,

Prisoners (edited)

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This cell the sole certainty, all else steeped in mystery. Why should we be here?

Not Calculable

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saw the world was a mess I did nothing about it, poured myself some apple juice

October

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For a few/ vivid weeks, deciduous shrubs and trees/ will seem to glow like flames and embers

Say What

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Jane says to Roy, “What are you doing, Roy?”“Fuck off, Jane, I'm reading,” says Roy.“Well you could have just said so.”“I did.”“I mean just without—”“Yeah, well fuck off anyway.”“I've had…

Detienen a 271 conductores en un Stop.

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Un consejo esconde un futuro desastre. Es como si Mar le dijese a Desierto "amigo...impresionante. Dejate elevar por la atracción de Luna y verás". Y Desierto le replicase "está bien, y tú Mar, deja que Viento lleve tus olas hasta el nacimiento de los ríos, es brutal". …

Yellow Dining Room (from The New Yorker)

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...you should pick a VERY OLD millionaire. Very old, and NOT VERY WELL...

Meet Cute

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This had the unintentional effect of me picturing her in a tight white top and tiny orange shorts. From up close like this, I had clearly misjudged her earlier. She could definitely be more than the quirky best friend in my movie.

The Shadow People

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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,

THE RICH RIVER

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I must have been six years old at that time, but the events of…