Most read stories

Flash Gordon in Iowa

15071507 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,

Click

15071507 views1010 comments33 favs

I am going to quit clicking refresh, only because it is clear nothing is happening out there. After I click refresh just one more time, that is, and then I am closing the window. After clicking one more last time. …

MOTHER MOUSE AND HER BRATS

15071507 views00 comments00 favs

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

When The Conversation Ends

15071507 views22 comments11 fav

It was a strange mood, unfamiliar, not one of her usual “I'm busy wrestling with my personal demons” type of moods. She'd been steeped in it all day and I, like a shipwrecked victim reaching out for any piece of flotsam…

As Anti-Vegan Bias Spreads, SaladShooters Fight Back

15071507 views00 comments00 favs

The Vegan Defense League is a vigilante group formed to fill the gap left by local law enforcement, who jam the parking lot a mile down the road at a donut shop. “By the time the cops finish their coffee and chocolate frosted donuts, we could be dead.”

What I Learned From Magazines This Week

15071507 views55 comments44 favs

In his heyday, Burt Reynolds owned $100,000 worth of custom-made toupees.

Postcard from Shambhala

15071507 views33 comments22 favs

Dearest Z— There is no way to describe this place. It is a pendulum, caught at mid-swing or maybe just a millimeter on the up side. It is a sense of sweeping, a cleanness. Distant clouds remind me of the day we took the train and the mountains acted petulantly,…

11am, Sunday, in Green

15071507 views00 comments00 favs

The eyelid of the sink blinks silence. The clocks choke on smoke.

On Clearance

15071507 views11 comment11 fav

She clutched her fat rolls and tugged on a pant leg. "I'm so embarrassed! You caught me on a bad day!"

Feeling fences

15071507 views66 comments44 favs

... he could feel the pointed picket spears.

Mr. Pickle and Mr. Peet

15071507 views99 comments55 favs

We got a sandwich at Mr. Pickle's, but they cut the sandwich in the plastic. Plastic wrap.

White Room

15071507 views66 comments22 favs

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

Ten Books That Have Stuck with Me Off the Top of My Head as I Make Them Up, #2

15071507 views33 comments22 favs

#2 The Typewriter Inside You by Harmon Gentle—I found this one at a garage sale when I was 15. Intended as a manual for sharpening one's typing skills, by the third chapter it became obvious that Mr. Gentle's sanity had slipped, and that rather than mastering the…

Arcana Magi Pure Vol.5 - c.3

15071507 views00 comments00 favs

It was unusual, a feeling of déjà vu waft in the air. However, this was completely new to them. Mayumi gripped her shoulders as Emi’s lips moved trying to ease her fear. Mayumi did not understand what this stuff was.

Fine, she said

15071507 views44 comments44 favs

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

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

15061506 views33 comments22 favs

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

The Fetishist

15061506 views99 comments77 favs

Sex is a fetish war -- a battle of trinkets of desire

What Keeps Us Awake

15061506 views11 comment00 favs

On Friday evenings they play Scrabble, a whole crowd of them. They use books to keep score, page numbers, instead of a long column of pencil scratches. They organize themselves into teams; the English majors all together, versus biology, history and horn players. She and he…

There's a Pube in My Coffee

15061506 views33 comments00 favs

Connor didn't bother to wait in the line of busy professionals, opting to cut in front of the sign that announced "Line Forms At Other End."

Metamorphosis Revisited

15061506 views44 comments33 favs

When I met Gregor Samsa he was still a cockroach, erratic and skittish whenever the light came on. We often spoke in the dark. I empathized with the man. I mean bug. Ok. That isn't fair. You can't call a man a bug because he chirps and eats dried skin cells. A…

In The Wake

15061506 views55 comments33 favs

Any form of exertion would defile what we are trying to do

Archaeology

15061506 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…

A Next Step

15061506 views1010 comments88 favs

The first night I met her we slow danced to George Strait songs for most of the evening and when we took a break, our talking went warm and well as we sat eating hot dogs and sipping beers until she dropped a couple of bombs, first, telling me she was married and then, that…

Worn

15061506 views44 comments33 favs

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

No Word for Enchantment

15061506 views1111 comments66 favs

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

Regarding Hank

15061506 views00 comments00 favs

Won't speak a word against 'em. Car trunk stunk like bad chicken long after, but I won't speak a word against 'em.

You're Breathing My Relapse

15061506 views11 comment22 favs

I was an alcoholic for ten years, starting in my early twenties and continuing into my thirties. Then finally, after many attempts, I got myself straightened out. My son's birth finally did it for me. It wasn't like a switch flipped in the delivery room…

A Requiem For The Heavyweights

15061506 views44 comments33 favs

Breathe a stench of Eton musk...

One Sick, Two Sick, Red Sick, Blue Sick

15061506 views66 comments55 favs

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

ice becomes a new marvel

15061506 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.