Most read stories

Flaubert Eats Breakfast with His Mom

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your mania for sentences / has dried up your heart

The Bob Delusion

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It couldn’t be a worse time for failed novelist Robert Grayson. He’s 40 and falling apart. He’s balding and accumulating a gut. His job writing technical manuals for software looks like it might get cut. Then his wife does the unthinkable and files

My Other Mother is a Ferrari

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******WARNING: Long-ass story****** Click at your own risk.

Black Squirrel Poem

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disorderly black squirrels / inhabit upper Michigan

On the Way to Your First AA Meeting

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The memory of thinking in some other language

Love

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Trent’s had many phases: Madonna, Bette, leather, water sports, rollerblading, haiku, chicken queen, rice queen, muscle queen, daddy. But religion? This is new.

Athena 2.0

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The story goes that the night before I was born my dad had a terrible headache.

Three Bedrooms in New Jersey

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After my father moved in with his girlfriend, my mother sold the split-level and rented a two-bedroom in an apartment complex rife with divorced mothers and the under-employed.

Dunes

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I went out through another cold still morning erasing my steps behind me not because I did not want to be followed but because I did not want to find my way back again.

To the Bear in a Neighbor’s Tree

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In the night, a several-hundred-pound Black Bear scaled our neighbor’s back fence, bounded down the gravel footpath between our houses and, confused by the people and lights, followed his instincts up a large pine tree across the street...

Women Making Love to Monsters

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I started dating the Minotaur because of Colleen; at the time she was going with a friend of his. The whole thing was a surprise to me because I'd never been attracted to Greek men. This is how it happened. Colleen's new guy, Ian, was known by many…

How to Make a Baby

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Eat slowly. Wait. Do not bring reading material. Do not bring headphones. Avoid distractions.

Often I think on who pulls the strings,

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In a plush leather chair, / high up a shiny skyscraper,

Peeg and Brie (opening of a teen novel)

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TEXT TO VICKY This sucks! Sorry for the teen-speak Vicky, but it does. You saw me in the hospital. It's just as bad at home. They still don't know what to do for my smashed voice box. I probably won't ever speak again. (Maybe with a mechanical thing lik

(1) Nan

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[Her adviser] looked at her and tilted his head, smiling. Over his shoulder she saw the M104 bus cruising up Broadway, and considered diving under it. Instead she took off toward the corner, in shame, and he followed. When they parted ways, he took her ha

Virginity

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I was seeking punishment so I put my lips around a bright green persimmon and bit down, the bitterness of its flesh overcame me...

Before the Door

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You just can’t believe your key / won’t open the front door anymore.

Am I Anna Karenina?

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You’re often photographed at Martha’s Vineyard at sunrise, Key West on New Year’s Day, Coney Island on Christmas, and variously at dive bars in Montauk. You’re a woman of a certain age and you are also a woman of the world. You’re a 21st century

Dinner at the Bigelows’

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Mrs. Bigelow loaned Tessa a black tulle maid’s uniform and helped her pin it in at the sides. She tied on Tessa the stiff white apron. Slippery, pale, opaque stockings of real silk oozed through the girl’s fingers, secured by a heavy satin garter belt

Cactus

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I counted telephone poles and the seconds between them. The old highway cut straight through the sand and it seemed the road would never end. No curves. No hills. Just poles.

My Kentucky Fried Ascension (Memoir)

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...as a boy I rode once in an elevator with Colonel Sanders...

Summer Girl

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You’re bro­ken. Your eyes don’t see quite right, and your hands don’t feel quick enough. I love you any­way.

Simmer Time

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Usually the predawn light means bedtime for wicked guitar players, but not that bloody Sunday.

Creep

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Every one of them will tell you I drank so much malt liquor I could barf up a distillery and that wouldn’t be a lie.

Fascination

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It rained on the morning of the party, and the weatherman promised it would continue throughout the day. But Marilyn didn't mind. She actually preferred entertaining in bad weather. Her rugs weren't valuable enough to worry about, and the gloomier the sky

Le Sucre Brun

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The commandant pried her lids open with steely thumbs.

Comfort of Friends

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She drove me to radiation, to acupuncture and support group. She brewed me concoctions that smelled of twigs and dirt...

Pi in the Sky

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The possibility for numerous outcomes – the possibility of anything, really – lives on the writer’s page.

Ain't Comin' Back

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He told of the wilting heat, the fulgent landscape, the people....

Intolerable Impositions

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"She gnawed her arm off in the morning, before he woke...."