Most read stories

White Room

15041504 views66 comments22 favs

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

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 ...

The Humanists

15041504 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.”

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.

Esmée

15031503 views33 comments11 fav

Esmée sat alone at a table on the terrace at Marina Jack’s in Sarasota. She had been there ten minutes and no waitress had approached her.

Take Back the Night

15031503 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

15031503 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,

Glossolalia

15031503 views55 comments22 favs

Method of divination. Open a book to any section. Drop your hand onto the page. Read that there is an exorcism happening in the other room.

Myself Today

15031503 views22 comments22 favs

Suddenly I'm not feeling it anymore. / Poetry has become insufficient. / I can't do it like I used to.

Snow

15031503 views77 comments11 fav

She talks about window treatments, how the place is maybe too much for one. Wants me to know she’s not much of a cook, and wants me to smell what’s in her oven and compliment her cooking anyway.

Archaeology

15031503 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…

Worn

15031503 views44 comments33 favs

The shirts hanging by the back veranda serve as our memorial to them.

Lessons from Survivors

15031503 views00 comments00 favs

You cannot go back, you cannot go home, you cannot cannot cannot…Only in memory is it possible to travel back in time. We all imagine it. We relive happy moments, sad moments, we exist, time exists and it passes. We cannot stop it.

Beachcomber's dirge

15031503 views1010 comments99 favs

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

July 16

15031503 views55 comments44 favs

Last night as a duration spent hovering in electronic media-space.

Fine, she said

15031503 views44 comments44 favs

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

Hope's Amanuensis

15031503 views66 comments55 favs

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

The Poisoning

15031503 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…

Aurora Borealis

15021502 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

15021502 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

15021502 views33 comments22 favs

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

Those Brain Motility Blues

15021502 views44 comments33 favs

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

Ichthyology

15021502 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.

Global Arms

15021502 views1010 comments22 favs

~(+)~

To All the Sisters on My iPod

15021502 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

15021502 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…

Thanking Harry

15021502 views22 comments22 favs

At a candlelit table near the back of the restaurant, Jack and Lois greeted the waiter as he delivered their drinks, a diet coke for him, and for her, a vodka and cranberry. He apologized for the slow bar service and promised to return in a moment to take their…

Paint-Can Harry Lets in Some Much Needed Air

15021502 views33 comments33 favs

Welcome the one and the all of you, welcome all you scraggly long haired weeds, welcome the no longer rolling stones of the new you, welcome you most beautiful little wonderfully…