Most read stories

January First

15051505 views1212 comments99 favs

Enumerate the small delights/ this bright first morning

A Break in the Cloud

15051505 views22 comments00 favs

Each had jostled and laboured for his or her place upon the blunt outcrop, in the cold persistent darkness, where the outcrop was merely something that had fallen and not quite been washed away.

White Room

15051505 views66 comments22 favs

A white room is empty but for you, a card table and a chair.

The Winter's Too Warm for Bears to Sleep

15051505 views88 comments77 favs

The winter’s too warm for the bears to sleep, and they get up in the middle of the night with insomnia and wander about the streets in their pajamas, knocking over garbage cans, looking for a midnight snack of some kind. They’re getting kind o

The Humanists

15051505 views00 comments00 favs

“She’s very sick. She’s dying,” and he smoothed my hair along my neck. “It’s leukemia. A very rare type,” his hand reached my shoulder and stopped there. “She only has a few months.”

Fine, she said

15051505 views44 comments44 favs

A rope is cleaner, he explains with a straight face. He's calmed by the visual.

The Poisoning

15051505 views1111 comments99 favs

The Poisoning I used to call my dad Serpico. Thirty years on the police force, and though a respected officer, he never fit in. He never had beers with the guys at the end of a shift or engaged in the more lewd locker room talk. None of the other cops were privy to which…

#32: Deep in Structures of Awareness (Structured Poem)

15041504 views22 comments11 fav

In ashen hills of yonder

Ichthyology

15041504 views11 comment00 favs

The doctors said, when she was born, that the gills would eventually fade away on their own. Nothing to fear, they said; no more unusual than the rare child born with a tail, or a dense pelt of fur, or a single sharp tooth jutting from its new pink gums.

Those Things

15041504 views33 comments33 favs

For me, it was that kind of moment. I got to come back. I had been here before and now, well now, I could come back. I had a chance to do it all again, bigger, better and well, just better. I hoped I could remember all that I learned the first time.

Global Arms

15041504 views1010 comments22 favs

~(+)~

To All the Sisters on My iPod

15041504 views44 comments33 favs

It was a wake-up call. A sign that I needed to stop and ask if I was making wise and sensible life choices. My iPod was full.

Style Shifts

15041504 views55 comments55 favs

Style Shifts “Oh, yes, my cousin. We were rude boys until the armed gangs started to gather. Used to be we could pass a night driving, playing our songs, acting tough. Yeah. We'd mouth off, flash some teeth, spark some anger when we felt like it. We…

Take Back the Night

15041504 views1717 comments99 favs

A woman who is, say, a culinary arts champion or an heiress devoted to literature such as Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman) or Peggy Guggenheim might be able to turn me on, turn me out, turn me around.

Flash Gordon in Iowa

15041504 views33 comments11 fav

I will show you how, in the spring, the sidewalks here look like a crossword puzzle resting under a glass of lemonade,

MOTHER MOUSE AND HER BRATS

15041504 views00 comments00 favs

Oh, you aren't going to lecture us, for heaven's sake?

The Judge's Wife Part 9

15041504 views88 comments44 favs

Suddenly something clicked.

Archaeology

15041504 views66 comments11 fav

I would like to go back (with spade, pick, soft bristles), and sift through time and layers, brush away the intervening years, and find: the tooth, knocked out by my then best friend, when we were seven, careening downhill in my father's wheelbarrow on Boscobel…

Spittoon (w.c.55)

15041504 views22 comments22 favs

“I’m pregnant,” he says...

Beachcomber's dirge

15041504 views1010 comments99 favs

...clash of gulls wend upwards, disappearing into grey night's high tide recedes

ALL THE REPORTERS WANT WAR

15041504 views77 comments33 favs

The countdown is on and daily the propaganda gets more and more aggravating It appears at times that the news media dictate and orchestrate more that just report on events of diplomatic shock. A huge effort has gone in to covering this coming war and it…

One Sick, Two Sick, Red Sick, Blue Sick

15041504 views66 comments55 favs

I found a diseased fish / wedged between some boulders near the pier

ice becomes a new marvel

15041504 views55 comments66 favs

at all altitudes and at all latitudes / glaciers in furious melt: / both Greenland and Antarctica headed both / to be ice-free isles adrift / and with shorter coastlines amidst higher seas.

Regret

15041504 views99 comments88 favs

Regret takes the shape of little clouds ...

Hope's Amanuensis

15041504 views66 comments55 favs

I was low on carburetor / oxygen and my fraud protection / had just expired.

The Tamarack Swamps

15031503 views44 comments33 favs

Last night, in a tavern called Wits End, we dropped quarters into a console, sized and shaped like an old TV.

Aurora Borealis

15031503 views99 comments55 favs

I recalled the one night stand I'd had with the girl one balmy summer night in Minneapolis. We lay on my bed in the moonlight, and I touched the nipples of her tiny breasts with the thumb and pinkie of one hand.

Jenny Whistled Through The Mail Slot

15031503 views22 comments11 fav

We all thought, Birds! We all thought, Nests inside the chimney!

Poem in A Dead Language Only I Understand, Translated for You

15031503 views33 comments22 favs

I used to be a poet, you know. / Better, in many respects, than you.

Those Brain Motility Blues

15031503 views44 comments33 favs

Philosophy: a muscular exercise of throat, jaw, tongue, and brain.