Most read stories

The Judge's Wife Part 5

13311331 views88 comments55 favs

—Jesus, that bastard has everyone in his pocket.

Downtown Milwaukee

13311331 views88 comments77 favs

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

Showtime

13311331 views1414 comments66 favs

Showtime on Broadway.

Meteorology

13311331 views1111 comments55 favs

Among the raindrops/ occasional plopping snowflakes.

Klonakilty

13301330 views1414 comments1313 favs

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

To a Young Atheist & Intellectual with Dior Glasses

13301330 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...

Mean Time

13301330 views88 comments77 favs

between

Accepting New Patients

13301330 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

13301330 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

Amateur Theory of the Universe

13301330 views1111 comments33 favs

this could be true

Archaeology

13301330 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…

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.”

Dreams Should Come with Buttered Popcorn

13301330 views88 comments88 favs

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

Dumb Ass

13301330 views1818 comments99 favs

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

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.

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,…

Spoke

13301330 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…

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.

This Is How You Make The Bed

13301330 views88 comments77 favs

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

Filter

13291329 views99 comments1111 favs

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

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

Rough Cut

13291329 views88 comments22 favs

He bites and imagines, numbed by want.

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.

Linear A

13291329 views1717 comments99 favs

let’s press our words into the clay/ in language so completely dead/ we have to re-imagine it.

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…

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…