Most read stories

falling, endlessly

13301330 views11 comment11 fav

Clouds quickly appeared, in a perfect peach sky. Big, puffy clouds, moving together, formed the shape of a heart.

Storm Chasers

13301330 views00 comments00 favs

“Okay,” I say, “but my point is the only way you’d ever know if someone really loved you is if they put their life on the line when it counts. Otherwise you gotta take their word for it.”

The Nude Pianist: A Novel: Chapter 25

13301330 views66 comments44 favs

It was 6 a.m. when the phone next to the bed awakened Francesco.

The Judge's Wife Part 5

13301330 views88 comments55 favs

—Jesus, that bastard has everyone in his pocket.

Downtown Milwaukee

13301330 views88 comments77 favs

Downtown Milwaukee My feet are exposed, never been out in public even out here— …

Eskimos Happened to Come Wandering By

13301330 views22 comments22 favs

Meet Carl. He's six-three, two hundred and thirty pounds. He has light-brown hair,…

Showtime

13301330 views1414 comments66 favs

Showtime on Broadway.

A Friend From Back Then

13301330 views1212 comments1212 favs

That afternoon she met me in the lobby of my hotel and we simply smiled at each other in the elevator going up to my room where we sat on the couch for about three hours and told of our lives, of being apart, for so many years, then sensing our time was nearly used up, I…

The Element of Ritual

13301330 views00 comments00 favs

Nurse Smithers straightened Dr. Baumgartner’s feathered head dress. it had slipped down below the caduceus so carefully painted on his forehead by the medical ritual staff.

Klonakilty

13291329 views1414 comments1313 favs

Magdalena White Herrington praised the lucky stars who’d sent her the Klonakilty ghosts.

Napomo 17: April 19 – 24

13291329 views1111 comments55 favs

There are no inspirations./ There are only the things I like/ and the much more numerous// things I do not like.

Mauthausen

13291329 views22 comments11 fav

I was feeling a bit introspective. I was busy in my own mind assembling the history of the place and getting ready for the visit. I was naturally not someone who would cluster up with a bunch of people I had just met and had arrived to participate in this

To a Young Atheist & Intellectual with Dior Glasses

13291329 views22 comments22 favs

You have such a complicated mind / for refusing to believe in God / just like any damned liberal / whose fingerprints / crowd the faces of a thousand / dollar bills / being passed around your great nation...

Accepting New Patients

13291329 views88 comments88 favs

You've had some truly awful shit pumped into your brains for years at a time now. The practice started a long time ago. It's not always your fault. The only lasting way to get it out of your head is to go and figure out exactly where…

The Two Stairways

13291329 views11 comment22 favs

She remembered how cold it was in the factory that day. A few of the high windows stood open as usual, necessary for ventilation when the machines were all running, when the concrete floors were packed with the sweating bodies of warm human workers. The

Her Man in the Navy Blues

13291329 views66 comments33 favs

In that time when the trunk was getting cleared out and when it became only the empty shell of what had once been so important, many things hit the match. She burned an old black negligee, a picture competing with the likes of a Vargas girl and other thin

Waiting for Fireworks

13291329 views00 comments11 fav

I take her hand. More grey dust rolls off the arms, over the railing, into the wind. It’s embarrassing and I let go. I think she told me to throw them away months ago. I rub her bare thigh. She laughs real soft like. The corner of her lip curls up.

Drinking

13291329 views00 comments11 fav

After you started drinking your meals and hating politics I wanted to climb inside, live in your stomach and dissolve. I wanted to make you see, hold you captive with arms stretched, pinned. listen again, swallow…

Amateur Theory of the Universe

13291329 views1111 comments33 favs

this could be true

eleven by eleven by five

13291329 views66 comments55 favs

(the hourglass has not gone digital, oh no,/but these days, silicon is in with the sand)

Summer, 1966

13291329 views44 comments55 favs

After my mother died, my father shipped me to my uncle's. He hadn't told me she was dying, so he could just mourn alone.Lena lived next door, Italian, my age -- which was ten -- beautiful. She was watched by goons in black suits. Her parents owned a restaurant. Across the…

Dreams Should Come with Buttered Popcorn

13291329 views88 comments88 favs

the brain plays impish tricks/ and entertains itself with avant garde/ home movies

Catalog of Backgrounds

13291329 views55 comments55 favs

nowhere after nowhere

Dumb Ass

13291329 views1818 comments99 favs

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

The Winter's Too Warm for Bears to Sleep

13291329 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

Perfect Lady

13291329 views1010 comments77 favs

The Tea Party member was married but cuter. He worked as a caulker, a tub and basin man.

Spoke

13291329 views00 comments11 fav

Laurel's new bike is powder blue, with silver tassels on the handle bars. Jenny's mouth actually waters at the sight of it, as though it were a fresh loaf of bread or a perfect, juicy orange. “You can ride it if you want,” Laurel…

This Is How You Make The Bed

13291329 views88 comments77 favs

He disrobes; shoes, socks, shirt, belt, pants. He smells of hard work. The nude whisper of everything else.

The Watchers

13281328 views77 comments66 favs

Up at the top, a quarter mile south, billows of black smoke crawled up the faint blue of the sky.

Filter

13281328 views99 comments1111 favs

The brain taints everything it brings to us/ with its limited apparatus, its precepts,// all the things it thinks it knows.