Most read stories

Girl With Glasses And Skinny Fingers

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Girl with glasses and skinny fingers playing with wires

Tree voices (revised)

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Shhhhhhh

Who Loves the Sun?

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beat them with fists and purses.

Assiduity Three

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Everybody needs a flaw or two. It builds character.

A Flam

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In the blacklight of the storm, mother would tremble, spit and sway as the shutters would clatter and she would give away her balance. It was more than my heart could bear. She would always center her accusation with, “your boyfriend is a rake and a flam.” That…

The Celebrity

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Mr. Blumberg and I sat side by side on a small couch in the family room. He was watching a football game on TV.

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.

Paleo Prophet

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We are insatiable

A World of Hurt

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Cat fight. I rush outside and swinging my trusty broom I charge the rolling yowling ball of black fur.

An Obituary of Comedy: The Life and Times of Munnu Shahbaz Kalandar Khan

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Sir Reginald Lionel Windsworth described the match in Englishmen's Lahore Gazette as, "A plethora of mistakes and complete absence of human sense."

Big Legs

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Her body: normal as a body, a baby’s body: skin and eyes.

Shadow Play

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I was quite alone in this small room with the tarp and the dying fire.

Hobby Lobby

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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.

Ilex Cahokia and A Common Piece

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remembering Cahokia, a place we rent near the water's edge, for we dare not enter

Working things out in my head

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A shot in the dark and everything goes black. It's as if the story never happened.

The Well

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It was by the well on one cold early spring morning

Learning About Sonnets

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Sitting in the upper last row of Wyatt Hall, Matt stretched his long legs under the fold-up desk top. He looked down past his fellow students' heads to barely catch something Dr. Mock had said. . . .

Diplomatic Relations

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I fully intend to show Hamilton the delights of soft Oriental carpeting and a delicious new position I learned not long ago. It involves a silk scarf, a leather strap and some aromatic herbs.

Real Heart

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A heart which is alive despite everything in the world that wants to deaden it.

Spider Bite

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“You done done sumpin’,” the old man guessed, “Sumpin’ bad...”

Rinds

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I miss Mother gentling the small of my back. She has forgotten me. Her little girl. Whose thumb she fussed over when a rose thorn scratched it and blood spilled like a secret. Whose smile she said was her morning sunshine, whose hug was incense. I yearn for her lips…

Hard Times

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None of this is real, he says, and the path slopes down to a house that is possibly haunted. One always looks in such windows, one cannot not look at the predictable detritus of another's failure, a queer satisfaction, a fairy's dust. But no, not real, none of it. And…

Black Ribbon

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The highway stretches out in front of me, a black ribbon winding into the future; a collapsing probability of possibility connecting me with the past and through it to the future.

Mosaic

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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…

Monolith

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She seems to be demanding someone donate to her a beard. No one has gone any further with this, and the electricity of her song about beards, listing, growing more undulant, crescendos.

Outside Thunder Pallets

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Carl’s peculiarity of toilet paper rolls is not covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act – he’s looked it up.

Not finding you

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Had this been a film, I’d have seen you at once. Extreme close-up: my finger on the green button that opens the door to the park. Long shot: my leaving my bike at the entrance. Slow shot: my walking down the narrow stone path.

Sniping

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Snipers wear camouflage clothing to avoid being seen. It wouldn’t do for a sniper to be seen because then the sniper might become the snipee.

On Mars

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We brought oxygen with us because we knew, everyone knows, there is no air on Mars. Everyone told us this as they waved goodbye back on Earth. Jay's mom even said, “Goodbye, honey, have a nice time and remember, there's no air on Mars. Are you aware of that?”…

Honey

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Third time that day, he was on me. On me like bees to a flower (or flies on shit, he'd correct me, no doubt). Sucking sweet nectar and breathing that breath — damn that breath — 'round my head, in my ear, pestering, bugging, like a bee he annoyed me. B