Most read stories

Shoot the Moon

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Neither of us thought of real winning. We set about brilliant losing, dark angel forms of luck and greed, the desire, the craving, the need to lose so strenuous that one wins; we tied at thirteen.

A THOUSAND PARROTS

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  The parrots woke Eddie up. That and Rocker snoring in the twin bed. A thousand parrots flying over the motel? They squawked, God how they…

A New Chapter to Song of Solomon: A Poem

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My beloved lets me crawl into bed and put my feet on him since his skin is warm and hot like a fire roaring from within his soft flesh.

A Strategy to Overcome Rejection

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“If your work is good you will get published. Just keep at it."

Archaeology

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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…

Illinois Route 3

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If this road could answer I would ask her what it is like to follow the path of the rippleshimmery river for too many miles through the slowly ghosting towns and the corncovered landscapes of the dying Midwest

My Uncle's Last Day in Hospice

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In and out of morphine dreams, he flies through the unfinished roof of Illinois sky. Below, matchbox-sized farm machines. A silo becomes his father's thermos, the silver-capped tower from which he stole sips at ten, his first secret. Back …

Sorry, Charlie

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Vietnam, Tet, and beaucoup Charlie

No Word for Enchantment

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fanned lashes on rouged cheek a glamorous sea creature in violet perfume

Dumb Ass

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I want to tell you how the odor of the flowers/felt her funeral day

The Three O'Clock Sun

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Here the three o'clock sun is an old patched up fellow, with a stained yellow beard, walking in a small crispy rain of brown leaves, looking at something that requires a bit of squinting no one else can see, on the far side of the softening…

What I'd Have to Call My 'Meatsack Family'

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This story is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental and unintentional and should not be inferred. (Really!)

Abyss

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When Lois finally found him down there, Johnny was wedged between a large rock and the trunk of an old, long since fallen, cottonwood tree. She said as she got to him, she heard his gurgling breath, fighting fiercely to stay alive. When she saw the deep, gathering, red…

All the Young Angel Heads

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I don't think you understand. A sad boy doesn't just die inside, slowly, he becomes withdrawn from certain types of lovely youthful reasoning out loud, accustomed to feeling what is expected, graded, just to be allowed to survive another…

Meaning of Life # 18

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To hell with the moon!

Houses Are Havens and the Outside Plans Your Destruction

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The first of the fires that started by the river in the abandoned mills were so hot they burned white and pale blue

Sheep

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Sheep are very philosophical, I hear. Stop this hopeless dreaming.

Magic Togs

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New Underwear

The Listener

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They think because you are a writer you are not much of a listener and so you begin to recognize all of the great opportunities to be much more of a listener and then you shut your trap and get sucked into the whorls of her big wet brown eyes with Italianate…

After Eliot

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Her breath was on me

Ghost Town

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She had just done it in the backseat with the man she decided would be her father. Or maybe it was the cast of his eyes under the dim bar lights. Maybe she insisted that this had to be done, to relive the night under the stars, under a dented roof of a station…

Grimace

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I dreamt I was raped the other night. Sometimes it was me, that is, and sometimes it was another woman with a dark bouffant hair-do. Definitely outside though and the hulking back of the man was covered by a charcoal wool…

The Good Ship - Forgotten

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As I gripped the wheel and stared at the expanse above my head, my compass spun wildly. Something wasn't quite right

Daily Living

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When we are given eternity, as a night is eternal

The Washing of the Quilts

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Sweaty feet, drool from the weighty sleep of mid-afternoon naps, the inescapable perspiration of the South: all combine to create the entwined scent of socks and stale toothbrushes...

Cat Woman Sexy #5

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Cultivate your vaginal tears at the gates of Thigh and Holy.

The Bird Nests of Lascaux

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With their brightly-colored bits of found string woven into the walls of their nests to teach their baby birds what the worms of the future will look like. Somewhat like the cave paintings of Lascaux for early man in France, when hunti

formation of a black hole

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who can quite say/when careless talk & confidence/slips into that other charged thing/so minimal at first

Slide Steel

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Fat Patty sniffs the delicate waft of peat and sidles over, proffering a grope in exchange for a few wet-lipped swigs. Hell yes.

mermaid tale

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your words that came crashing over me/ so cold the clear shock was like salt water